Guest Bedroom Shellacked

It's hard to see the sheen on the wood, but I've finished applying two coats of shellac in the guest bedroom.

I just keep plugging along on this project. Next up: Masking the master bedroom for primer/paint.

My youngest brother, Jeffrey, and his family are coming to crash with us next week, and so I've been on a mission to get these rooms finished to the point where we can pull up the floor masking.

Tulip Portiere

I really cannot stand the French doors in our living room and dining room. They don't stay closed and they don't work with our rugs without chopping quite a bit off the bottom of the doors. They also take up a lot of wall space, which is at quite a premium in this room. These doors probably made a lot more sense when the fireplace was used to supplement the heating on the main floor.

 

So, I've been thinking about making portiere curtains to hang in those doorways so we can take down the French doors and reclaim the limited wall space.

(We would, of course, retain the doors and stow them in the attic for the next owner. Though, we discovered during the remodel the French doors are not original to our house—the house was originally built with pocket doors.)

Anyway, I ran across this portiere design at Textile Studio's web album and I'm in love. I really wish I could afford to buy a set, but perhaps I can make them. I'd actually need to make four of these panels to span both doorways. I guess I found another project to add to my queue.

Update many hours later: When I was trying to research how to actually make a portiere (to answer questions like whether it was lined, or suspended by rings), I went and dug through a number of period texts. I share the best of them below.

Mmmm...Peaches

We found a good deal on peaches so we stocked up—54 pounds!

They've taken a few days to get ripe, so we're spending part of today and tomorrow processing the fruit. Jeff is the foodie in this house, so he blogged about it over at his food blog.

I am NOT loving these reusable jar lids. The rubber seals seem to be just slightly larger than the plastic lid so when you screw on the metal twist ring, sometimes it catches on the rubber ring and pulls it off the jar rim and ruins the seal. You can already tell the jar on the left side of the picture didn't seal (fruit isn't at the top). Sigh. I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong. Losing a jar out of every batch is not going to be acceptable.

Anyway, our plan for this round is mostly to can peach slices, several pie fillings, a small amount of jam, and I think this year Jeff is going to try and make peach salsa. He's been buying peach salsa from Trader Joe's and we love it—we go through probably a jar a week—and we'd like to figure out how to make our own.

Paint Stripping Tips

Now that we've gotten 2 rooms stripped of paint, I thought it would be nice to mention a few of the lessons we learned over the process. Our process has certainly evolved over the last year and we've gotten much faster and efficient. Many of these comments have been mentioned in earlier posts, but I figured it would be easier to find if I consolidated them all in one post.

Our big break-through to success was audio books. Paint stripping is not a mentally challenging activity and boredom quickly sets in. If you can find a way to listen to something interesting, like audiobooks or podcasts, the time passes more quickly. By listening to audio books, we were able to spend far longer days working on paint stripping projects.

The comparatively inexpensive variable-temperature heat gun was the most successful heat stripping tool we found. (We bought ours for $60 at Home Depot). In our house, the heat gun, used in combination with profile paint scrapers, got off most of the paint. We tended to use the lowest temperature that worked, about 800°F on the paint in our house, and it really wasn't hot enough to burn the wood as long as you didn't stay in one spot too long.

After we stripped the paint with the heat gun, we would follow-up with an application of Klean-Strip or Jasco premium chemical stripper. To remove the stripper, we found the most effective tool was a stainless kitchen scrubby. It didn't scratch the wood like the wire brushes, in fact, it helped smooth the wood (and perhaps even reduced the amount of sanding required). And even though it would clog up with stripper goo during the process, once it dried, the dried goo would just fall out to be swept up for disposal. We had several of these going at a time, and they lasted for quite a long time.

In order to reach those uncooperative corners, try dental tools. They can often reach those difficult crevices. (We bought ours at a local army surplus.) First, apply the stripping chemical and allow it to work for a couple minutes, then use a dental tool to remove the last bits of paint.

Next, if you're going to fill holes with a stainable wood filler, do it before you sand. We found the filler would sometimes get onto the wood surrounding the hole and would discolor it, necessitating more sanding. Better to fill the holes before you do the final sand.

When sanding edges or tight corners, try contour sanding grips. They were a life saver for sanding the edges of the raised panels on our bedroom doors.

For small spots of paint embedded in the wood, don't sweat it. The stain may cover it. And if not, simply cover it with a matching paint.

All this said, we are not professionals and are still figuring this all out. So experiment and figure out what works for you and we look forward to you sharing your tips.

Guest Bedroom Staining

Since I got off easy on the shellacking this morning, I recruited Jeff's help to start staining the guest bedroom woodwork. This is just the first pass; we'll still have to go over the wood with a second different-colored stain to match the rest of the wood in the house.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased by my motivation lately. Clearly, I'm ready to be done with this phase. It probably also helps that one of my brothers is going to be in town in 10 days and he wants to crash with us! =)

Update later in the evening: We put on the second coat. Now we wait a few days before shellacking.

Master Bedroom Shellacked

I managed to finish shellacking my very first bedroom. Yeah! Now that I've done it once, it is far less intimidating and I know I can manage the rest of the upstairs.

I worked hard this week and put up 2 full coats in the room. Each coat took somewhere between 4 and 5 hours. And since it was forecast to be very hot this weekend, I was hoping to get the room finished by this afternoon.

I had actually planned to do 3 coats of shellac, but when I went up to apply the third coat this morning, it looked great with just the 2. Perhaps I applied it a bit thicker than the professionals. Or my homemade shellac is just different from the Zinsser ready-made stuff.

This room certainly looks shinier with thicker coverage than the downstairs woodwork.

Anyway, once the shellac has the hot weekend to bake on, I can move onto painting next week. It is so exciting to finally get so close to finishing this bedroom; it's taken us over a year on this one.

Started Shellacking

I have been dreading shellacking the master bedroom woodwork since February. I heard it was difficult and shellac was finicky, so pretty much any excuse was good enough to procrastinate working on the project. Well, today, I finally got up enough courage to try shellacking. Result: Success!

While it's not super fun, I didn't find it especially difficult. The shellac does dry pretty quickly and you definitely need to keep moving, but it's something I've decided I can manage on my own.

It probably helps that we made our own shellac from 2 pounds of shellac flakes dissolved into a gallon of distilled alcohol and so it's not as thick and unforgiving as the ready-made stuff; seams between sections are not as noticeable. Of course the downside of using this thinner shellac is I'll have to apply 3 coats!

So now, maybe, we'll finally start making some decent progress finishing these bedrooms.

Before starting, I did peruse a couple useful webpages on shellac:
Choosing And Applying a Traditional Shellac Finish by Jeff Jewitt

Getting a Beautiful Woodworking Finish with Shellac by Chris Baylor