What Can I Say?

So here it is Saturday, I don't have to work anywhere, tax day and its chaos is past (don't ask me how that came out if you don't like naughty words), and I was going to get something done on the house for the first time in maybe three weeks.

The plan was to nail in the quarter round to the base on the fireplace wall and around each adjacent corner, tint some natural-shade Minwax wood filler with dye to match the shellac finish, and fill the countersink holes.  Maybe then I could even think about putting my bookcases back where they belong.

So I start with the 16-gauge Porter Cable nailer because behind the base on that wall I have the solid masonry exterior structure

                                               
, and I figure I need more power.  First piece of trim goes in all right, but on the second one-- Oh-oh.  Split one of my carefully-coped pieces of quarter round.  It's in the corner where it's dark; I'll fill it and let it alone.

But maybe the bigger nailer with the 2" nails is overkill.  I switch to the 18-guage Chicago Pneumatic brad nailer.  Firing 1½" brads from it, mostly because I couldn't find the 1¼" length at the Big DIY Store Where I Now Work.  Should have been fine anyway, but they weren't.

At least, they aren't with this nailer.  They're all sticking up 1/32" to 1/16", and I can't get them to countersink, no matter which nail set I use or how hard I hit it.

I conclude that even though the woodwork doesn't really back up to the masonry, but to the plaster over it, the Harbor Freight brad nailer (which I picked up cheap and used at the local recycled tool place) doesn't have the force to drive a skinny 1½" brad that far.  At least, not when the top layer is rounded.  I've found the manual online and it doesn't seem to have a countersink adjustment.

So I may have to try to find some 1¼" brads after all, pull off the quarter round (except for the split piece), remove the longer brads, and try again.  That, or resign myself to my house's future owners fulminating against me when they see those shiny nail heads poking out of the nice shellacked wood trim.

Hmm.  I wonder if I still get the employee discount if I order a non-stock item?

One Step Forward, Several Steps Back

This is a retrospective post, started a good five or six weeks ago.  Why it wasn't finished then, or even on the official post date, will become obvious as you read . . .

It began in my first apartment after I graduated from college in the late 1970s.  After a year of so of stacking my LPs against the wall, I was finally able to afford a bookcase to hold them.  Tall and narrow to fit the available space; Scandinavian design with real teak veneer over particle board, very simple and modern.  My tall teak bookcase has accompanied me from apartment to apartment, getting dinged and losing pieces in the process, and finally has ended up here at the Sow's Ear.  But what looked good or at least all right in other settings simply doesn't work now that the red William Morris wallpaper is hung in my living room.  I'm not really keen on painting natural wood pieces, but the teak finish looks shoddy and cheap in my repapered living room.  Buying a new bookcase isn't an option right now.  Best solution?  Paint it black to match the mantlepiece.

I wanted to do it in oil base paint, since books and album covers stick to latex.  Took awhile till the semigloss black was available at the Sherwin-Williams, but at last, a week or so before Christmas, I picked up a quart and set to work.

This is when the trouble began,and trouble that's all the more troubling because I deliberately and foolishly overlooked it at the time.

The oil-based primer didn't brush on smoothly.  I ought to have deduced something from that.  But no.  I had the sillyassed idea that somehow the black top coat would even things out.

It didn't.  More streaks and ridges.

Well, maybe it just needed a second coat of black.

Oh, dear.  Streaks, ridges, drips, sags, and blobs.  It was terrible.  A friend who saw it said it looked great, but I couldn't agree (I think she was just being affirming and wanted to save me work).  Could I sand it down?   Yeah, right, and bring up all the white primer undercoat.  Sure.  No, the paint simply Would Not Do.

Did I feel like a wastrel and an idiot?  I did.  The behavior of the primer should have told me what would happen with the paint.  Should have returned the can unopened and gotten my money back.  Though maybe I was optimistically thinking of the decent job I achieved with white oil-based paint on the bookshelves up in my study.  That was SW paint, too, and it levelled out fine.

Decided to do what I should have done all along:  Refinish the tall bookcase in black shellac.  Ordered some black aniline dye powder from Shellac.net.  But did nothing on the refinishing for over a month, being busy with the hallway floor.

But now the paint and acrylic topcoat are done in there, and I needed to allow it time to get good and hard before I take down the baby gates and allow traffic on it.  Good time to deal with the tall bookcase.

Weapon of choice?  The heat gun, of course, followed by a rubdown with the Western Wood Doctor refinisher.  Started with a couple of the shelves that were loose.  Then I managed to get another pair of shelves free and set to work on the carcase itself.

Didn't take as long to get the paint and primer off as I'd expected.  Things were going along pretty well.  Only trouble was, I had the thing on its side with my head poked into it and the heat gun kicks up a lot of dust and fumes.  And I wasn't wearing a mask.

Why not?  Well, because I wear glasses.  And if I wear a dust mask, especially in the winter when the temperature in the house is lower, my glasses fog up and I can't see.  Can't see, can't work.  Makes perfect sense.

But the Sunday before Presidents' Day the fumes really started getting to me.  I mean, my throat and sinuses hurt.   Stopped for the night before I'd intended to.

Where I've left it

Next day, it hit me, "Idiot! you have that special mask you got when you were cleaning the fiberglass insulation out of the attic!  It's got a gasket!  Why not use that?"  So I did, and what do you know?  No fog, no fumes, everything was fine.

But everything was not fine.  Too late!  The day after that I had a bad sore throat. After a few days, that gave way to some sort of full-on respiratory ailment.  Aren't I clever?  I know the tagline of this blog is "I'll make a silk purse out of this house if it kills me," but that is not what I literally had in mind.

Finally took myself to the doctor's yesterday.  Yeah, I've got the flu.  They prescribed me an antibiotic, the five-day kind, which seems to be doing some good . . .  But no work on the house till I get over this.  I barely have enough energy to drag myself to work, and I do that only because I have no sick leave.  I've set myself back and I'd earnestly kick myself for it-- if I were well enough to care.

For My Sins

I'm not sure how to explain it.  Too much care or not being careful enough; not doing well or not knowing when to leave well-enough alone.  But some diabolic fate seems now to be binding me to the next-to-the-bottom tread of my stairway to the 3rd floor, there eternally to be chained not physically, but emotionally, as I expiate my shellacking sins.

Late Wednesday night the 3rd, I assayed to get the seventh coat of shellac on those stairs.  It didn't go too badly, really.  I filled a divot in the next-to-the-bottom step with the Miniwax wood filler putty that you're not supposed to finish over.  But I need something flexible there and the shellac ought to move with it.  It seems to be working so far.

But after I got done, at just about straight up midnight, I noticed that I hadn't properly brushed out the finish at the right hand side of that same tread.  You definitely could see a brown build up there.

So did I go to bed and sleep on it and see if maybe it looked okay in the morning?  Heck, no.  I got a brush with some alcohol on it and tried to blend it in.

Of course, it didn't.  It just took the upper coats off. 

I tried a little more.  It took off some more.

To hell with it.  I tried cleaning the whole surface with alcohol.  It didn't take enough off.

Off to bed, and deal with it later.

On Saturday the 6th I went the whole hog and pulled out the Western Wood Doctor refinisher and the 00 steel wool and took the entire finish off of it.  So there. 

And proceeded to start essentially from scratch on that tread and started applying the six or seven coats anew.

Last Sunday, I was getting there.  When I wielded a full brush with a light hand, the shellac blended in beautifully. Just one more coat and I'd be done!

Damn!  Somebody remind me not to be doing that after 11:00 PM when I'm tired and the light isn't that good anyway.  This last time, I failed to notice or brush out puddles on both sides of that tread!  It looked terrible! 

Was I going to get out the WWD and strip it off for the second time?

Not likely.  An article on the This Old House website says you can repair shellac, everybody says repairability is one of the great things about shellac, and I was going to repair it.

It's taken me the last three days (and at least one dream-obsessed night) to deal with it, using a small artist's brush first to dissolve the brown ridges and then to lay on a little color at a time.  But I think-- think!-- I'm to the point where I'm going to say Good Enough.  I know the aberrant places are there.  I will have to live with the reminder of how dumb it is to do finishing at midnight when I'm tired and not thinking or seeing straight.  I stick my camera in close where I can catch every last irregularity of it. But nobody else will notice unless I point it out to them.

And if nothing else, this proves that I was right to do my experimenting and get my technique down on these upper steps.  Pretty much no one's going to see them except for me.

Scary Things

I knew the shellacking was going too well up to now!  I knew the Demon of Klutziness was going to pop out and get me at some point!

Or did I just ignore the Angel of Good Sense?

Friday, I had the fresh shellac for the stairs all mixed up and ready to go.  I'd been decanting the stuff into a square plastic Rubbermaid storage container, which was handy for the brush and had a nice lid to seal it between coats. 

That evening down in my workshop, I poured the tinted mixture into this and managed to fill it all the way to the top.

"You're going to spill that," my good sense told me.  "Pour some of it back."

"No, I won't.  It's better to have more in the plastic container.  I'm going to need it for the last two coats."

So I took the closed and brimming container of shellac upstairs.

Once up at the top of the 3rd floor stairs, the first thing I realized was that I'd forgotten to add the teaspoon or so of 91% isopropyl alcohol to keep it workable longer.  But I was too lazy to go down the basement to get the bottle and add it.

Next thing I noticed was that there seemed to be a lot more hairs and dust squiggles landing in the wet shellac than there were last Tuesday.  You think maybe the vacuuming I did a few days ago didn't last till the end of the week?

Struggling with that, I got the first four or five treads done well enough.  But on the fifth or sixth one down, I was reaching for the smaller brush to do the nosing, and-- out popped the Demon of Klutziness!!!!

No, I got careless.   I jiggled something, or joggled something else, and that full container of shellac tipped over and cascaded down the stairs.

I knew it!  I knew I was going to do something stupid like that!

There was no time to wring hands, or be dramatic, or even take pictures.  The river of shellac was washing over at least three treads, and I had to clean it up before the whole job on all of them was ruined.

I grabbed a clean jar I had at hand, and brushed all the runny shellac I could into it.  Once that was closed and in a safe place, I quickly brushed the wet remainder over the treads that needed to be done anyway

What I didn't think of was that the lowest tread that was spilled on, the one with the least renegade shellac on it, was the one I should have brushed out first.  By the time I'd dealt with the overflow and the two treads above, this one was splotchy and blotchy and too tacky to do anything with.

Yesterday noon I tackled it.  Applied another coat of shellac, hoping it'd blend in as advertised.  So I took a pad of sheep's wool wrapped in a piece of old T-sheet, soaked it in denatured alcohol, and rubbed off the top layer or two off.  That removed the blotching.

Today I've been reapplying the coats to that tread, and I think it's to the point where my scary mishap doesn't show.  Just now this evening I've got the official sixth coat on all the steps . . . which should mean I'm done with them . . . if I didn't think they really need a seventh coat to get the color I want.

We'll see how that goes.  Hopefully the shellac spooks have had enough and will leave me in peace!

And Then I Go and Spoil It All by Doing Something Stupid Like . . .

(We pause while Frank and daughter Nancy go to fade . . . )

All right.  Today I got back on the 3rd floor stair sanding work.  The general plan was to do as many treads as I could with the shop vac at the top, then when it would no longer reach, to move it down to the 2nd floor and finish the treads at the bottom.

But I discovered last week that with patient application with the big oscillating sander I could clean the treads off a lot better than I thought when I started this job.  So before I moved the vacuum cleaner down, I wanted to go back and redo the three winders at the top.  I'd given up too soon before and left a lot of the carpet knife scratches on them and some general dirt, and I knew I could do better.

So I did.  The scratches aren't totally obliterated; at least, there's still some discolora- tion in the wood where they were (which shows up less in person than it does in the pictures), but for the most part the cuts themselves are gone.  The winder treads look a lot cleaner and brighter and now they match the ones below.

However.  Still.  Nevertheless.

The third winder from the top has a crack in it, that left the pieces on either side of it uneven.  You know, I says to myself, if I just keep at it with the sander I can get that levelled off and get off the dirt that's collected in there.  What?  You say I could switch out and use the palm sander to do that?  Oh, surely not!  That'd leave a depression!  I'm going to use the big dual motion sander and keep it moving and the tread will come out nice and even!

Uh, notice anything strange about this picture?

Yeah, that's right.  Talk about "something stupid"!  No, sanding down the rest of the tread to match is not an option.  I want to be able to walk on it, after all.  Nor is replacing it without mass destruction, since the treads are slotted into the stringers.

Oh, carp carp carpitty carp!

OK, let's think of something.  All right.  How's this:  The wallpaper is going to be William Morris, and he was influenced by designs from the Middle Ages.  The tile I've got my eye on for the first floor hall has a Medieval motif to it.  I've got reproductions of Gothic art all round the house.  That's it!  I'll just tell anybody who asks that I wanted my 3rd floor stairs to look like the turret stairs in a Medieval castle!  Never mind that in that case the low place would be in the middle of the tread and not at the side . . .

No use!  Epic DIY fail!  Now I've gone and done something that future owners can rag on me about.