Starting Over Is Not an Option

With one sealer coat only

So today I'm tackling the shellac job on the inside face of my front door.

I hoped to be able to do it with the door hanging and not risk scratching the new finish on the exterior as I heave it on and off the sawhorses.  But I couldn't keep the sealer coat from dripping as I brushed it on, no matter how careful I tried to be. About the fastest way to ruin a tinted shellac job is to let it get dripped on at any stage, and I had to give in and demount the door again.

And wasn't that the way I did the back door four years ago?  Of course, that meant I had to sit down for a half hour or more reading 2012 entries in this blog to see if that was so.  And if it was, how did I manage not to do any damage to the shellac job on the exterior?  I distinctly remember having the door laid out on the sawhorses on the back porch, sanding the first coat of wine-red paint off the interior face because it didn't flow out.  I'm pretty sure I had the outside done before that . . . or did I?  Never found a post that told me what I wanted to know.  But I sure managed to eat up a good chunk of time I could have been working on this project now.

Old towels and painter's tape

A little after 6:00 I faced the inevitable and gave the sawhorses some extra padding.  I think I managed to manoeuvre the door onto them without destroying my previous work; I'll have to check in the daylight.  But finally, I was getting something done.

. . . The nice thing about shellac is that for the first coats at least, you only have to wait fifteen minutes to a half hour for it to dry.  But here it is nearly midnight, and I'm nowhere near the six or seven coats I hoped to lay down today.  No, I'm sitting writing this entry while waiting for the fourth coat of shellac to harden up, and the cold night air (59̊ F) is wafting in through the open windows and the screen door and freezing me out.  It would have been really nice if I'd gotten this door face done for good and all, but I'm falling asleep over the laptop and I don't see it happening.

I should probably wait for daylight to continue, anyway.  I put way too much mahogany dye in too-thin a mixture of the Kusmi #1 button lac I dissolved yesterday, and this fresh batch of dye is stronger than what I used on the outside of the door.  So with only two coats of tinted shellac and two of clear, the inside of the door is already darker than I planned it to be.  (It took nine coats on the exterior to get the same tone.)

This is what happens when
your shellac is too dark
and too thin

And the topmost panel is all blotchy, and I can't depend on more coats of tinted shellac to even it out.  Carp, carp, carp.

Not sure what I'm going to do to solve it.  Starting over is not an option.

ADDENDUM:  Around 12:30 AM I gave in to reality and rehung the door and called it a night.  I'll look at it tomorrow after church and if that panel is still as ugly as I think it is now, I may have at it with the orbital sander and try again.  But that panel only.  I don't have the shellac on hand for a complete redo.

But I'm wondering what it would have looked like had I not tinted the shellac at all.  Too late now.

Getting into Gear

See this?

That's my pretty Christmas tree from last December.  That's also the ugly front room it's standing in.  That room's been ugly for years, and in a flurry of planning and resolution-making in January I determined that by this coming Yuletide it will be redone.

But with twelve or twenty other projects to pursue and with my limited spare time during the school year, nothing was going to get done on the front room until summer.

Summer came, and other projects still took priority.  Nagging, guilt-inducing-if-I-didn't-do-them projects.  Besides, I had three long, lazy, open months ahead of me.  There was plenty of time for the front room.

But early in the morning the 24th of June I got bored of doing accounts and sorting paperwork.  I rebelled.  I fetched the heatgun, the scrapers, and my leather gloves up from the basement and had at the stubborn, stuck paint on the sidelight to the left of the front door. The light was bad and I only scraped a little, but it was something.

The next afternoon I carried on with something even more rewarding--- stripping the paint off the outside of the front door.

I guess that puts me past the point of no return, since I can't have a bare door once the fall rains come.

The 4th of July, I had at it again, and made good progress before time to go to work that evening.

Lovely, the way the old paint came off in ribbons under the 1200 watt heat.

Still, I had a boatload of other, crucial, non-house projects to finish.  And I intend to self-publish my first novel by the end of this month, and had to get busy starting my little publishing company to do it properly.  Then the linkage on the gear shift on my car went out and I had to replace the bushings (yeah, did it myself, with a neighbor's help).  And the garden needed worked on.  And the yard kept needing mowed, which takes forever with a corded mower.  And I lost a day reporting for jury duty.  Then came the scare with the refrigerator freezer. And now one or more of my cats has decided they'd rather pee on plastic bags, shoes, rags, or even the bare floor more than in the litter box, meaning I'm playing constant catch-up trying to get rid of the stink.  And so forth and so on.

As I said in my last point, the end of July I got fed up with not being able to get the refrigerator cabinet down and marched in and stripped the rest of the outside of the front door.  Got a little more done on the inside trim the next day.

And there the project sat . . . until I dropped by the Walmart one night after my shift at the Big Blue Box Store.  I ran into a gaggle of my students--- that is, some kids I sub teach for--- and they greeted me enthusiastically.

I didn't recall any of their names (Sadly, I never can.  There are too many of them).  To get past the awkwardness I asked:

"So, when does school start?"

"In three weeks."

Three weeks!!!??? Where did the summer go!?  Panic!  Hurry!  Run and get myself in gear!  Quick, get things done!

Which I have.  It's a "good" time to do it, as my hours at the store have been cut to three nights a week.  I truly took advantage of that last Wednesday, and I plan to tell you All About It.  But if I spend any more time today working on this blog I won't get any house renovation done.

This Is What Is Known as "Existing Conditions"

My big goal after prepping the dining room last month for wallpaper was simply to get all the bills and receipts and tax documents entered and sorted out so I could have a clean Study for the first time in months.

Have I achieved this?

No.

I've  been Writing, and obviously not on this blog.

I've had the fiction writing bug for a few years, but not very seriously:  ideas rattled around in my head but I seldom got around to writing any of it down.  Kind of like a renovation project that always in the planning stages and never gets built.

And then one day you finally get out the shovel and start digging, and who knows what you'll find.  In my case I found writing obsession, broken by periods like the present one when I'm a little stuck and I'll mess around on the Internet for hours rather than do the work to push on through.

Last November I started a writer's blog where I could post my productions and moan and groan about the turmoils of an amateur fiction writer's life (what there is of it).  I put it on WordPress because for various reasons I didn't want my Google/Blogger name(s) St. Blogwen/Kate H. attached to it. But I have mixed feelings about WeirdPretzel (which I describe here), so a week or so ago I started a doppelganger Blogger blog, under a separate Google name and account.

All right, now I've revealed all that here, my cover is blown.  Obviously.  Never mind, there's a method to my madness.

Both blogs are named The Writer Sits Down, and you're invited to pop on over to your choice of platforms and see what my mind has been building while my power tools have been idle.  The novel I'm presently revising is about two architects, so that's renovation related, correct??

 But speaking of DIYers and existing conditions, may I present this:

"Human Remains Found Behind Home."

That is why contractors demand more money for Contingencies.

O Gosh, Such Excitement!

The tall bookcase, the tall-black-used-to-be-natural-teak-Scandinavian-Modern-1978-vintage bookcase, is finally up and loaded.

It only took some drilled pilot holes (through the plastic sleeves), two sets of new black metal shelf supports, a couple ounces of wood glue, a couple-three more coats of shellac, and quite a few whacks with the rubber mallet to convince it to come together.

And even after all that, it was still wanting to gap at the top once I stood it in its corner again.



"Take that!"  

Whack!  

"And that!!"

Whack-whack!!

"And that!!"

Whack-whack-whack-whack!!

Another coat of shellac to cover up the evidence, let it dry a day or so, and by Friday it was ready to receive back all the LPs and books that have been sitting in boxes in my front room the past, oh dear, five years or so.

Of course I managed somehow to put the new shelf supports at the wrong height.

Never mind.  I was not enlarging any more holes so I could change it.  No law said I had to put all the books back the way they used to be (even if I did print out an old picture as a guide). Maybe this time I'd do it more logically and better.

So they're in.  And the walnut veneer bookcase (which used to belong to my grandmother) is in the process of getting levellers on its right end to accommodate my sloping floor (had to paint the white plastic part black.  Looked glaring otherwise).  And last night I stayed up till 4:00 AM cleaning out my workshop so I can go back to cutting trim for the stairhall and new stops for the windows.  Not that I didn't start that task two or three months ago.

My excuse for the slowness is that I'm substitute teaching during the day most days and within a hour or two of leaving school I'm working every weekday evening at the Big Blue Box Store.

If I were truly dedicated to renovating my house, I'd avoid the computer and the Internet and work-work-work on the house until I fell into bed.

I am not that virtuous or disciplined.  But millimeter by millimeter, inch by inch, I'm getting things done.

By Christmas 2014, I may even have the wallpaper in the dining room stripped.  Now that would be excitement.

Lack of Resolution

Maybe one of my New Year's resolutions for 2013 should be to post more to my houseblog.

Why haven't I, this past autumn?

A lot of it has been because I've been so heads-down busy working on the house that, outside of work, I don't have time for much else.  I've gotta a great deal done, and the work goes on and on.

Part of it has been because Explorer.exe has gone wonky on my eight-year-old computer, making it very difficult, if not impossible, to sort my photos so they can be conveniently found.

A great deal of it is that the digital camera I bought last March has never worked properly; it gets stuck on 100 or 200 ISO no matter where I set it and takes fuzzy, badly-colored, under- or over (with the flash)-exposed pictures with very poor resolution.  And even though I've been painfully aware of this since I bought it last March, I haven't pushed past the hurdles I need to surmount to have anything done about it.

And maybe my biggest reason for not posting these past few months has been lack of resolution in myself.  For all the above reasons and from a childish sense of "I'm s'posed ta do this and I don' wanna!" I've let the rebellious feeling in my stomach prevail and when I do get to my computer I do ten other things rather than post to my houseblog.

Well, maybe I need to grow up and overcome that.

And maybe doing something about that crappy camera should also be on my resolution list.  I'm too house-poor to buy a new one, but at least I can take advantage of the one-year warranty I purchased on it, can't I?

Meanwhile, here's a bone, a picture of my living room fireplace with the wallpaper up and the oil painting rehung above it for the first time in probably three years.  This was taken about a week and a half ago.  Happy new year!

Oh, Fudge

I've been working on resecuring the plaster on the south wall of my living room since this time in February.  I'd been contemplating repairing that plaster since July of 2007 at least.  Now, a major cause of procrastination is the fear that a project won't come out the way you hope and visualize.  A major cause of depression is when you discover that your fears very likely were right.

The only problem with the plaster, as I originally perceived it, was up at the righthand corner of the cased opening between the living room and dining room, where the doorway jamb and head casings come together.  When I pulled off the trim to strip it, lo these many years ago, I found that the plaster protruded beyond the room face of the casing a good half inch.  Meaning that the face trim gapped more than a little.  Previous owners had fudged that over with spackle and paint, but I'm going back to natural wood. 

When I learned about Rory Brennan's Big Wally's PlasterMagic® system, I knew it was just the thing to take care of that protruding area and make the plaster nice and flat to receive the newly-shellacked trim. 

But things have not been that simple.  Back on the 9th of February when I started drilling the holes for the conditioner and adhesive, I noticed, for the first time in eight and a half years of living here, that the entire top fourth of the south living room wall bulges outward.  On the righthand side, especially, the protuberance was a half inch and more.  Clearly, I was going to need more Big Wally's adhesive than I had on hand.

Insert interval while I got around to ordering more tubes, while it shipped, and while it sat in the box in my dump of a living room waiting to be used.  All right.  So this past Sunday, I got to work.  And noticed two odd things:

First, that the plaster bulge on the righthand side, where I started my operations, went in a little with the washers and screws, but not as much as I expected.  Only a quarter inch at the most.  But the plaster wasn't flexible and it didn't give, and the wall developed no cracks as I drilled the washers in, though that's what you might expect if the keys where pressing against the lath.

Second, that up at the crucial corner the plaster wouldn't move in hardly at all.  At this point I did have cracking before and the washers caused more yet.  It wasn't salvageable.  So I pulled some goodish-sized chunks of it out, and saw-- And saw that up there the lath sits at the most an 1/8"back from the room face of the wood casing.  Seriously.  I poked the lath and it's in there solid.  It has no place to go.  Around that area the plaster thickness ranges from 3/8" to 1", and it's no wonder the door trim needed some fudging before!  It's going to need some fudging again when it's time to fill in the holes--but I'll describe that when I get to it.

But what did this mean?  That maybe the plaster at the top of the wall is thicker and the old wallpaper concealed the problem?  No idea.  The plaster I'd treated seemed well-secured enough, and I let it go because I was out of washers anyway.

Well, now.  Give it a few days for the adhesive to try and for me to take care of other business.  So Monday night I'm up there on the ladder snugging up the areas above the doorway and on the lefthand side.

And what's this?  In these places, where the bulge wasn't as bad, the plaster moved in a good 3/8" or more, with a soft, subdued, stomach-squeezing whhummphh!   What the dickens?  Why did that pull in but not the worse area to the right?  Was there something wrong with my drill bit, and did I not drill the holes deeply enough on the right-hand side?  Did the whole wall actually need    to be done?  After all this labor and material, was I still at risk of it failing and falling down?

Not to mention that where I power-screwed the anchors in too hard, the plaster just crumbled.  But the surface of the wall looks fine!  What's up with this?

Oh, fudge.  Aggrieved, aggravation, frustrated, crabby.  Last night I tried the conditioner and adhesive in a few more places on the upper righthand part of the wall, trying to pull that bulge in a little farther.  Drill penetrated more than an inch, inch and an eighth even, but the pull-in when I tightened the washers was a fraction of that.  Maybe the plaster is extra-thick at the top of the wall.  Or maybe the big hairy plaster/lath gap is there-- full of keys cushioned by all the Big Wally's I pumped in.  However it is, I can't do anything more to true it up-- and no, demolition and drywall is not an option.

This is not what I had in mind nearly five years ago.  I'm holding my breath that a lot of joint compound and the new wallpaper will disguise the mess.  I even have visions that the wallpaper will end up holding the wall together.  But I have no call to throw rocks-- or chunks of plaster-- at my fudging previous owners.  It's a pot we're all in together.

Yeah, I Know, I Know!

I admit it.  I've been putting off patching my Study ceiling so it can be repainted.

In the first place, it's hot up there these summer days.  Even if I ran the air conditioning in my house-- which I don't-- it wouldn't adequately cool the third floor.  Last month sometime I went at the problem area to some extent with the 5-in-1, but that's where it's remained.

But all right, it's been cooler lately.  But there are so many other, more fun, things to do downstairs.  And sometimes I'm actually working.  For money!  So that doesn't get the ceiling patched.

Last Friday, however, I finished clearing the papers, magazines, files, tchotchkes, and so forth off the horizontal surfaces and stashed them down in the guest bedroom.  And yesterday, armed with the dull-razor-blade scraper, I took the long walk up the two flights and went to work removing anything else that was still loose.

Ha.  I knew it. It never ends.  I thought I was dealing with bubbling in the finish layer of the plaster.  No.  What had bubbled was the paint, all five or six layers of it, in various lovely shades of white and pink and green.  This was good in a way.  Much better than failing plaster.  But if the goal is to remove all the paint that's "loose," the project can go on forever.  There's no end of what that blade can get under.

Finally convinced myself it'd actually be a good thing if the joint compound could seep under the raw edge of the old paint a little.  And headed down the basement for the joint compound.

Ah. There we have it.  Another big reason for my procrastination.  I knew it, I knew it, that big five gallon tub of joint compound was moldy.  OK, so it was two and a half years old.  But the lid was on so tight I could hardly pry it off.  So why should it be moldy?  But it was, I wasn't about to put any of it on my ceiling, so it was off to Lowe's last evening for a less-ambitious quart of vinyl spackle.

Got that on last night.  It never goes on smoothly, no, it does not.  Surprise, finish plastering really is an art and profession. Tonight's task was wet-sanding the first, rough coat, and oh! I do not enjoy that.  Not fun, not fun, not fun.  And since I applied the second coat of spackle this evening, I have to do the sanding thing again tomorrow.

(Grumble-grumble-rumble)

But hey, once that's done, it's time for primer!  And paint!

Once some very heavy pieces of furniture get moved.  And the trim to be repainted gets washed.  And everything gets festooned in drop cloths and painter's tape. 

(Grumble-grumble-rumble)

Actual Work Getting Done

Shellac dries fast.  This is good.

Really.  The shellac work I'm doing in my stairhall is actually starting to look like something.  I may actually be on my way to getting this done.  

And that's scary.

(That was a joke.  I think.)

The inner casings on the five 2nd floor hall doorways are all done, including the casing to my bedroom door that I had to take down to mend.  That also has primer on the bedroom side.  The blotchiness problem I solved thanks to some advice I dug up the other night on the Internet-- A forum suggested cutting down the amount of tint in the shellac and let the application of successive layers build up the color.  I was just upstairs, and was getting a little worried that maybe I've got it a fuzz too dark, but it's not as dusky as it originally was, and we're talking at night under only a 60 watt lightbulb.

The flash makes it look brighter than it really is

The stair rail and shoe are done as well.  I really like the way the bannister came out.  I've figured out that if I start shellacking the piece well short of the top, work in the length between the initial wet area and the top with a dryer brush, then keep stroking upward (or in one direction only, if working flat) into the wet area, I can minimize the blotches and keep the finish uniform.  It worked on the bannister, I think.

The balusters are done as well.  They were theoretically mostly done last summer with the two coats I gave them then, but I saw that my intended three coats wasn't going to give the tone and sheen to match the stairrail and shoe.  They have five coats of shellac on them now; six on the outside faces.

Now I have to lay on more coats of shellac to the shoe and rail fillets.  They're laid out on my workbench downstairs, waiting the next time I have available.  But first I have to strip (waaaaagghh!) the cap to the 1st floor newel post.  I didn't have enough light in my workshop, and didn't notice till it was too late that a wide brown-black line of walnut-mahogany shellac was accumulating all around the bottom edge.  Yuck.  Strip it off and start again.

Stairs to 3rd floor study

The top newel post is done-- I think-- and today I got a second coat on the risers to the 3rd floor and on the main stair stringer on the stair rail side.  (I ran out of the right tint of shellac after that, and the main stair risers and the opposite stringer had to wait till I could mix up more.)

Last evening my friend Hannah* and her husband Steve* were going to come over to help me reassemble and rehang the casing to the bedroom door.  They couldn't fit it into their schedule as it turned out.  And now that I've remembered that I really want to get the finish on the hall floor before that trim goes back up, I see it's just as well.

Guess what-- this trim isn't that dark. Stoopy camera!

But in anticipation of getting the bedroom door hung, I shellacked its stop moulding, though I haven't touched it for any door else.  So this afternoon I took a piece of that stop upstairs to make sure I was getting the shellac-white primer divide on the casings right.  I stood the piece up against the closed door to the guest bedroom, flat against the shellacked jamb.  And, oh, my!  Wow.  It actually looked like something!  Like real work getting done!  Like maybe sometime before the Mayan calendar runs out my house might get out of my head and into reality!

That's scary.

Mortise Patching Exploits

Okay, here are the photos from January 11th and following I promised a few days ago.  (Note to me:  Don't load too many photos at once into Blogger.  It's nigh-impossible to wrangle them into the correct order).

The job was to fill the old hinges and strike mortises in casings where doors had been removed.  I don't know why I stressed over the job and put it off for so long.  When it came down to it, it was really no big deal.

First I tackled the doorway between the 1st floor hall and the front room.  This used to be the front door of the house, but the door was removed when the porch was converted to a front room, and the mortises were covered up with ¼" thick pieces of plywood, which my PO-2 shellacked to match the rest of the woodwork. I tried stripping one of those a couple years back and said, No more.  The old door casing was good enough for me.

I started with the mortises, with pieces of original yellow pine cut from an old disused floorboard, glued in proud:

Top hinge mortise patched

Middle & bottom filled proud

Bottom hinge-side patch.  Almost right depth as-is

Old Entry Door Strike Mortise

Then I did the same for the strike.  Here's what it looked like Before.  (I knocked out the piece at the upper right to avoid having to make any fancy cuts.)

Mortise Patch Glued In

Same again, with the rough patch for the strike mortise glued in.  Note how shallow the mortise is.  No way I'm risking my fingers to cut a patch that thin on the table saw.

Then I moved operations upstairs.  This is the doorway to the third floor stairs.  Evidence shows that there was no door there when the house was first built (they had to hack away the bullnose on one of the treads to accommodate it), but it's also apparent that a door had been there for a very long time.  Not sure if it was the same owner who took it down and filled the mortises with pieces of characterless white pine, but I knew they'd glare if I let them remain.  So they'd been out ever since I stripped that doorway (mumble, mumble) years ago, and if I had a ton of money, I would have had a true-divided-lite, tempered-glass door custom made and rehung there.  But that ain't the way things are, so these mortises were dealt with next.

(When I'm rich-- HA!!-- I can always knock out the patches and put my dream door up then.)

Strike mortise that needs filled

Bottom mortise rough-filled

On the hinge side you can see where the POs marked the wood to position the hinge.

I really wish I could have found some old wood to match the existing grain, but I had to settle for what I had.  Hopefully, the shellac will even everything out.









 Here's the strike patch glued in, with some extra help until it dries.

Door to 3rd floor, strike side

  

Old screen door rabbet

But one more thing needed to be done before I could leave all the glue to dry.  There was the matter of the holes left in the trim of the former entry door when the original screen door was relocated, sometime in the early 1930s.  I'd had ideas of taking wood filling and sculpting it somehow to match the curves in the trim, but I wasn't quite sold on the idea.  But wait a minute.  Didn't I have some long pieces of old yellow pine the right thickness, left over from cutting strips to fill in the 2nd floor hall flooring?  Yes!












That worked, and with a little wood filler daubed on to simulated the curves, I pronounced it Good Enough for one evening's work.

3rd floor stairs, hinge side, planed

Next day, I  took my grandpa's antique plane and smoothed the patches down.  Really, the realization that I could use it was what got me past the brain-freeze and procrastination.  Before, I'd been sure there was no way I could cut fiddling pieces of wood like that to any accurate thickness, but plane, plane, plane, and the difficulty (and the extra wood) was removed.

Old entry doorway, hinge side, filled

Then lay in wood filler to close up the gaps.

Old entry, strike patch sanded

Old entry, hinge side sanded

 Day after, the downstairs doorway got sanded.

Old entry, hinge patch, fine-sanded

Old entry, strike patch, fine-sanded

Then filled some more, and sanded again.

If your eyesight is bad as mine, the patches can hardly be seen!

Wood filler galore

Nice and sanded

Strike side

This still left the upstairs patches to fill and sand and finish off.  That didn't happen till the evening of the18th and early on the19th.


































When you tap on the piece over the old strike mortise, it definitely sounds hollow.  Don't care to think how thin it is, now it's sanded down.  But it's flush, and it'll do.















Here we are in the 2nd floor hall, with all the mortises filled and most of the tape off the stairs.  And that's enough for now.

No, the House Hasn't Eaten Me. Yet.

Have I been working on the house?  Yes.  Have I been working on the house as quickly as I ought to? No.

I had two doorways to patch where doors were removed, at the old entry door between the front room (former porch) and the stairhall, and at the bottom of the stairs to the third floor.  A couple weeks ago I cut old yellow pine to fit the hinge and strike mortises, planed them down, and sanded all round the casings.  They look nice, but pictures will have to wait-- I loaded them onto the other computer.

Sadly, there are no new shellacking pictures.  That's because I haven't laid on any new shellac.  I'm still cleaning up the dust mess, and the work is going very slowly.

First, because I'm changing Internet service providers and I'm dealing with the whole old-new e-mail address transition.

Second, because cleaning my Study meant more than sucking up the dust, it also meant going through my books, rearranging many, retiring some to the storage space, selecting some to give away, and even chucking a few.

And third, it's going slowly because I don't like deep cleaning the house, and I keep putting it off.  It's so much more fun to watch on-line videos that actually stream thanks to my new, faster ISP.

But as soon as I publish this post, I'm going upstairs to clean my bedroom.  The curtains and dust ruffle, which were filthy, are clean and dry down in the dryer, and until the room dust is gone and I can put them back, there's no going to bed for me tonight.

So What Now?

If anybody's checking my project trackers over there on the right these days, you'll notice something has changed.

Yes, finally, the one for the stripping of steps to be refinished is at 100%.  Cheers and huzzahs!

About ten days ago I went at the painted stringers of the steps to the 3rd floor with the heatgun, then took a break and devoted my home improvement energies to garden work.  But today I seized my refinisher and steel wool with both hands and got the stringers and the last risers and treads cleaned off and done.

That was completed by around 4:00 this afternoon, with no thanks to a last handful of embedded carpet staples.  If this were ordinary times for me and my energies weren't sapped by the aftereffects of chemo (sorry to have to mention it, but it's true), I would have put up the dropcloths and dust barriers and gotten on with the sanding.  As it is, I cleaned up the stripping mess and retreated to the computer to read other people's houseblogs and contemplate what's next.

1) I managed to chip paint off the trim of the doorway at the bottom of the 3rd floor steps.  I repainted that myself seven years ago.  It's going to stay painted.  I tried smoothing it off with refinisher.  But it's going to need sanded, regardless.  Do I do that first?  Or, given the stricter lead paint regulations, do I just say oh, phooey, and strip that as well, just to get that much more lead paint off?  No, it wouldn't be done according to all the current EPA hazmat rules; I'd be doing well if I put up with wearing a mask in this heat.  But it'd be done.

2)  The treads and risers will need some light sanding, at least.  Can I do that with the animals in the house?  Should I make sure I have the shellac ready to apply right after I sand, so I don't mess up the bare-bare wood walking on it?  That will mean sequestering the critters, somehow, somewhere.  But how, and where?

3)  Have I waited too long since I mixed up my aniline dye colors for the shellac?  I did it on the 24th of May; where did the time go?  Should I have put the jars in the fridge?  Should I get myself in gear to make me some shellac out of the buttons I have in the fridge since last year (they're still good, definitely), or should I go the easy and standardized way and go pick me up some Zinsser's at Lowe's?

4)  How much barrier plastic am I going to have to put up against the sanding dust?  Which would be worse, croaking from the heat and no ventilation with the plastic up, or cleaning yellow pine dust off everything the next five years if I scamp it?

5)  Given the fact that I have to work around the chemo tireds, how long should I allow to sand and refinish the hallway floor and both flights of steps?  Two or three days?  Can I get space in a local kennel for that long at this time of year?

5)  More to the point, how should I finish the risers to the 3rd floor?  Back when I first took the carpet off, I was thinking I'd paint them white and leave the treads natural.  That'd demark the study and its stairs as different, maybe more private. But the stairway comes down past the doorway and I'm not sure I want the white "intruding" into the Craftsman ambiance of the 2nd floor hall.  But maybe that's just my lack of guts talking.

I was hoping to work with a photo of the stairs to render two or three different color schemes for them.  But my cheap-ass photo editing software so far hasn't allowed me to do that.  Or maybe I just don't know how to use it.

Well, one good thing about writing about my worrywarting:  It's shown me how silly a lot of it is.  I mean, just do it and get it done, for goodness sake!

A Girl's Gotta Do What a Girl's Gotta Do. Well, Mostly

One salutary (Attention! Irony alert!) effect of facing possible cancer is that it focusses one's mind on what's important and on what one can let go. Including when it comes to floor renovations in a 2nd floor hall.

Would it be ideal if I could rip strips of old flooring as long as each individual crack and taper them perfectly to fit, end to end? Yes.

Is it essential that I rip strips of old flooring as long as each individual crack and taper them perfectly to fit, end to end? No.

Could I fill each crack with different widths of wood, depending on how big the gap is? Yes.

And once the floor is shellacked, is anyone going to notice that the strips aren't continuous-- other than me, that is? Not at all.

I have some old floorboards, handily nailed up as blocking around the doorway to my bedroom. So what's stopping me from slicing off what I need from there?

So Monday afternoon I pried one off and hied me and it down to the basement workshop and the table saw, where I cut a selection of filler strip widths. And did not to slice my fingers. And after I got home from choir practice, I nailed the now-slenderized floorboard-blocking back into place.

Tuesday evening I was very naughty. I took one of the wood strips, one that had come from the groove edge of the board, and determined that, once cut to length, it would be perfect for my widest gap, just outside the bathroom door. And it was, for about half its length. But then the crack narrowed and the piece wouldn't fit. I got out my grandfather's plane (which I'm sure needed sharpening) and went to work on it. And went to work on it. Around 8:15 PM I felt overwhelmingly frustrated and sleepy and decided to lie down on the bed for just a little rest. And, since it was cool in the house, why don't I just pull the quilt up over me?

You guessed it. I conked out and fell asleep. Until nearly 8:00 Wednesday morning. In my workclothes. With lights blazing upstairs and down. Poor dog didn't get his evening constitutional and nobody got fed.

Much as I hate losing the income, I was glad I didn't get called in to work that day. I wasn't looking forward to tackling that filler strip again, but it had to be done. Besides, I got nearly twelve hours of sleep. What was my excuse?

It took some more planing. And some sanding. And more than a little doing other things that did need to be done, like cleaning out part of the back garden. And finally, at nearly 2:00 AM last night-- ta-da! I fitted my first wood filler strip in a crack in my 2nd floor hall floor. Used Tite-Bond wood glue, and I'l leave it to dry 24 hours. The websites say to glue the piece only on one side, to allow for movement. I tried, but it didn't seem like enough. On my head be it.

But here it is. Looks real purty, don't it? That slight rise at the end is over one of the nails. It'll come level when I sand the floor.

I would have done more, but first I have to figure out the best way to split the 7/8" thick slices lenghwise. That'll give me more strips per board and keep my hall from feeling like a bed of nails while I'm waiting for the glue to dry.