A Dado is Reborn

I was able to get the woodwork in the dining room mostly shellacked over the weekend. It is a very time consuming process, mainly due to the volume of woodwork in the room. I spent at least 12 hours over the past few days putting on 2 coats. Shellac is pretty much idiot proof and I’m very happy with the results, for the most part. The dark wood on the upper cabinets is a little too shiny. I’m going to try and knock it down with some steel wool and see if that helps. Maybe it will look better once the blinds and drapes are on.

I started working on this room 5 and a half years ago, if you can believe that. This would have been when I owned the house for about 3 years. I had stripped the room of wallpaper and was trying to figure out what to do with the woodwork. It was painted green, which was bad enough, but that wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part was that it looked like it had been painted by a 4 year old after his 2 year old sister had attempted to paint it. There were runs and drips on top of runs and drips.

Simply painting again was not going to suffice. Even if I ended up painting in the end, I had to do something about the copious amounts of paint that were on the woodwork. Sanding was the first thing to come to mind, but there were two problems here. First, it was way too much sanding. Sanding is really only for taking off a small fraction of an inch of surface. Second, the previous owners had painted just a few years before with a high gloss, latex paint. That type of paint doesn’t so much sand as it does roll up at the edges.

I decided to try a heat gun. I didn’t own one, so I went down to the hardware store and bought the least expensive one I could find. I had no idea how well it would work, so I didn’t want to spend a lot of money if it wasn’t going to work. As it turned out, it worked great and that first heat gun burned up in about 6 months. I then went and bought a much better heat gun and I still have that one after hundreds of hours of use.



The stripping went through 5 steps. Here it is in March of 2004. The windows are to the right. I started in that corner, just to the right of the fireplace. The door to the room is on the other side of the fireplace, so this is the most inconspicuous place in the room. If I screwed it up, it would be the last place in the room any one sees. Fortunately there was shellac under the paint, so for the most part the paint just peeled off in sheets. It was really pretty amazing.

The next step was chemical stripper. This removed small bits of paint in the corners and most of the shellac. The shellac had caramelized from the heat gun and had become sort of baked on.



After that I used denatured alcohol and steel wool to get the rest of the shellac off.







And then lots of sanding. I was getting really nervous at this point. The wood looked bleached and dried out. You can see two pictures up where I used a little boiled linseed oil and turpentine on a small place to see if it would come back to life. It did. The last step was micro faux graining. There are always tiny little specks of paint that can’t come out. Usually this is in the corners or at joints, but also in places where the wood has been damaged from a chair or coal bucket hitting the wall too hard.



This is the wall opposite the windows. I'm actually ripping up the floor in this photo. The carpet as been removed, and then from the front of the picture moving back you can see the plastic, fake wood tiles on top of particle board. Under that is tar paper, which was stapled down to the original redwood floor. The fake wood tiles were put down in the 70s.

The wood work was first painted in the 1950s. The original color was white and then there was just about every color in the rainbow until we get to the hideous shade of green you see in the photos. I call it Puke Green. Ask for it by name and Sherwin Williams. Go a head, I dare you.

Also, in this photo, you can see where I discovered the long lost dumb waiter style door that leads to the kitchen. It had been boarded shut and wallpapered over back in the twenties. Also, to the left you can see the remnants of the Murphy bed that had been installed back in the 20s. All of that has been restored.

And now the dado has been resurrected. Here it is today, five and a half years later. That is the same section of wall from the first photos in the post. It didn’t really take 5 and a half years. The initial paint stripping took about 3 months, and then nothing happened for a very long time. Well, a lot happened in the house, but just nothing in this room.











And now it is finally done!