Jenny and I spent just about all day today working on the baseboards in the room, and I'm happy to say that they are sanded and ready for finish!  We were trying to save some time and mess with regard to the chemical stripper on these baseboards--we had tried it in two spots previously, and found that it was pretty difficult to scrape clean the curves.  They were too small for the smallest curved scraper that we had available, and too big to do easily with a flat-edged scraper.  Our solution on the baseboards was to use some card scrapers designed for woodworking to scrape the surface mostly clean, then follow-up with the sanding regiment.  I had initially hoped to be able to skip the 80 grit and go straight for the 100/120, but there were still some rough bits when I was finished.  Card scrapers are meant to be used a certain way, and the correct stance to use them in the right position is difficult to impossible while operating so close to the floor.  The result is that there were some bits that I couldn't clean nicely with the scrapers, so we did a round with the 80 on the 1/4 sheet sander.

I showed Jenny how to use the power sander, and put her to work with that.  While she went around the room, I followed her with the MultiMaster to do the parts that the bigger sander couldn't easily handle.  After she and I were done with our first pass, we went up my parents' house to grab some food (thanks Mom and Dad!), then it was back to work in the room.  We did the same arrangement where we followed each other around the room with 120 grit.  These baseboards are looking good at 120, so I'm stopping there.  It's also a royal pain in the neck to do the curved and detail bits on these baseboards for some reason, so this is making life somewhat easier.  I was also able to do a pretty good job in the detail sections with the scrapers, so they don't need a whole lot of help. 

So we end the day with all of my card scrapers (eight edges each on two standard scrapers, and four curved edges on a profile scraper) dull as all get-out, a few sheets of sandpaper used, and baseboards that are clean and ready for finishing!  Woot, as they say. 

This week is going to be pretty busy for me in the evenings.  Jenny is going to work on cleaning up some of the top of the door to the hallway, and then it will be ready for finish, too.  My only full free day is Wednesday, but I plan to work a bit on Monday and Tuesday evening to get the floors taped-off around the baseboard.  I also need to pick up some more shellac on one of those days.  Wednesday will be a finishing night, then, with the baseboards getting at least one coat, and maybe getting additional coats on the smaller window and the pocket door frame.  If I'm in a position to get a coat on the door to the hallway, I'll do that, too.  I have a feeling that one may have to wait a bit, though--I don't know if I'm going to have time to sand it in time to finish on Wednesday. 

I'm hoping to be painting by next Sunday.  I think we can do it. 

jonathan

I feel like I should hang a "mission accomplished" banner over the pocket door frame.  Of course, the last time I saw someone do that, the "mission" never really ended.  So yeah, we're not doing that. 

We did finish the pocket door frame today, though, so that's highly awesome.  It got its first coat of shellac, just like the other window.  I'm going to work tomorrow on scraping the baseboard, then scraping the remainder of the inside of the door frame to the hallway.  Then I'll sand whatever I can get sanded.  We decided tonight to let the outside of the door frame to the hallway wait until we have the rest of the room pretty much wrapped-up.  It needs some more stripping in a few spots, and has the potential to eat a lot of time.  It is one of the pieces that we can actually finish after the holidays, if necessary.  We don't need to have it finished for painting to take place, so it can get cut.  Also, as long as we have the first coat of shellac on all of the woodwork, I'm comfortable taping things off and painting.  We can add more shellac after the fact.  The first coat will make it possible for us to wipe off any drips as we go.  I'm going to put on as many coats as I can on everything, though.  Since it usually dries in an hour, I have the potential to get at least two coats on in an evening. 

Tomorrow should be interesting.  I need to do as much as I can. 

jonathan

After picking up our chandelier for the living room (woo hoo!), picking up groceries and cat food, and coming home to make dinner, I was tired.  I didn't do any meaningful work on the living room tonight.  I plan to work all weekend, though, to try to get things back on track.  We're not too bad off right now, but we still have a lot of stuff to do.  Tomorrow I need to finish the finish sanding on the pocket door frame and get a coat of shellac on that.  While the first coat is drying there, I need to get to work with the scrapers on the baseboard, and try to get as much of that scraped and ready for finish sanding as possible.  Sunday will be working on whatever I didn't get finished on the baseboards, and moving to the door frame to the hallway.  I'm going to use the scrapers there to speed-up the sanding process.  They are able to get most of the stuff.  I'll still have to contend with the smaller curvy bits, but between the MultiMaster and my multi-fingers, we should be able to bust that out.  My personal goal, ludicrous as it might be, is to have the rest of the sanding finished by the end of the day on Sunday.  I have things on various nights this week and next week that are going to cut into my housework time during the week.  If I am at the point where I'm shellacking things, then I can probably get all of the coats on that I need all over the room on the nights that I do have available.  Even if not all of the coats are applied yet, we *could* be on track to paint next weekend.  As long as a coat or two of shellac is on everything, I feel comfortable taping-off the edges and painting, then finishing the shellac after the paint has dried. 

Here are how my estimates are working out right now: 

Pocket Door Frame

• < 2 hrs. finish sanding
• 0.5 hr. initial coat of shellac
• 1 hr. dry time
• 0.5 hr second coat of shellac
• 1 hr. dry time
• 0.5 hr third coat of shellac
• (time permitting) 1 hr. dry time
• (time permitting)0.5 hr fourth coat of shellac
• Total work time:  4 hrs.

Baseboards

• 2+ hrs. scraping
• 2 hrs. finish sanding
• 0.5 hr. initial coat of shellac
• 1 hr. dry time
• 0.5 hr. second coat
• 1 hr dry time
• 0.5 hr. third coat
• 1 hr dry time
• 0.5 hr. fourth coat
• Total time:  6 hrs.

Hallway Door

• No idea. At least 2 hrs. scraping, 4 hrs. finish sanding, etc.

Adnvantage:  Us!  I'm so close to being finished, I just want to get it done at this point. 

That's all for now.  More updates tomorrow. 

jonathan  

More work tonight.  I didn't get nearly as much finished as I had hoped, though.  My plan for tonight was to complete finish sanding the pocket door frame.  Yesterday was spent sanding through 180 grit on all of the mostly-flat pieces that I could get with a pad-based finish sander.  Today I switched to the detail sander and my hands to finish the curvy bits.  I love that MultiMaster, but I love even more this new sandpaper from 3M.  It does still get loaded sometimes when hitting some pockets of old varnish that didn't get completely stripped, but it is much better than the other stuff I had been using.  That new paper on the MultiMaster--now that's a thing of beauty.  I was able to zip through most of the sanding on the curvy bits.  I made the decision to only sand them through 120 grit.  This was partly to save some time, partly because I only did the other two windows up through 120, and partly because I have a hard time telling the difference between shellac on a 120 grit sanded surface, and shellac on a 220 grit sanded surface.  Even with the MultiMaster, some of this trim still has to be hand sanded to get into some of the areas.  Before I do the hand sanding, though, I bust out the dental picks and go after any stuck paint bits that were missed during the stripping phase.  After that, I re-sand anything that I had hit with the picks, then hand-sand the necessary areas up to 120 grit. 

Tonight, I was only able to get completely finished with half of the frame.  I'll have to do the other half tomorrow.  I just got too tired.  I was starting to feel tired on the ladder, which is when I knew it was time for me to clean up and hang-up the mask for the night.  I can't wait to get some shellac on it, though--I think that it looks really good.  I'm finding a good balance between super-anal-get-all-the-paint-out-no-matter-what side of me, and the hey-I-can't-see-it-from-five-inches-away-so-just-deal-with-it side of me.  :) 

In other news, I determined that the hand scrapers I have for woodworking will work great on the baseboards.  There are some areas that we'll have to sand by hand, but having these tools should make that job go faster. 

jonathan

After Jenny and I got home today, I went to start working on the room a bit.  My goal was to get as much sanding as possible finished on the pocket door frame.  I was able to get through grits 80-180 on the Bosch sander, then noticed that it was getting close to 10PM, and I was getting tired.  I was hoping to finish all of the sanding on that bit of the room, but I think that'll have to wait until tomorrow.  It is looking good, though.  :) 

jonathan
   

Sometimes, I take my lunch break and get a quick sandwich or something, then go over to a nearby Starbucks to get my Favorite Drink (venti shaken passion tea lemonade, unsweetened!).  Sometimes I'll even get an evil pastry.  I like to watch people.  I sit in an inconspicuous spot and watch people through the windows, or sometimes inside the place.  It sits on a fairly busy pedestrian corner, so there is usually a lot of activity outside.  I especially like to do this on rainy or snowy days.  I don't know why. 

I did this today, after a sandwich at Quiznos.  I sat down at one of the few tables available (the end of the semester brings a lot of college students with large binders of other people's work to copy--or so it seems to me) with my drink.  While I was waiting for my drink, this odd couple behind me decided that the guy was going to go and get a chair while the woman waited for her drink.  There is one big easy chair in this Starbucks, which he took for himself.  He pulled-up a standard wooden chair near it for his friend/wife/whatever (I'll just say "wife" from now on to be concise, though I suspect that they were actually husband and wife).  I sat down with my drink near them, and then she came to sit down.  They didn't say anything for a while, then she said something.  The guy responded saying something to the effect of, "So-and-so is swine," then, "I don't want you getting involved with her."  Then he proceeded to tell her that everyone in their apartment building or whatever is a cheat or a swine or somesuch, followed up by saying, "We just have to live with them because that's the best we can afford."  I felt bad about this, until I noticed that his wife was dressed in some older, well-worn clothes, and he was there in all kinds of flashy fashion-branded gear (including the sunglasses, which are absolutely necessary on a completely overcast grey day, when you're inside, and the lights are dim, and there is no sun).  Then he went on to tell her, "I've got it.  This is the big one.  This is the one that is going to finally make us money."  I'm thinking to myself, "Oh boy, here comes the scheme...."  She said something else (I can only guess what she might have said), and he responds with, "I'm the artist here.  I'm the artist.  You're not the artist.  I'm the artist.  I know what I'm doing.  You're not the artist," and, "When I show this to Andy, that's going to be it.  We'll make thousands.  Thousands!"  She said something else (I couldn't hear her, in case you couldn't figure that part out yet), and he responded saying, "He's going to like it.  He has to like it.  He's going to take it.  This is his only shot at it." 

The conversation was getting a little odd, so I decided it was time to leave.  This guy was completely strange in so many ways. 

There's my fun story for the day.  More work tonight on the house is planned.  Paint stripping and sanding in the mix....

jonathan

My Mom came over this evening to give us a hand in the room.  We got some more stripping finished.  The big frame around the pocket doors is ready for sanding.  The frame around the door to the hall is probably about 1/2 finished.  I'm hoping to get the pocket door frame sanded tomorrow.  Woot, as they say. 

jonathan

Today was another day of good progress.  Thanks to the work we did yesterday, today we were able to get the other window in the room done with its first coat of shellac.  My Mom and Dad came down today, after we all enjoyed some city chicken and ice cream at their house.  Jenny had to do a little bit of shopping for the week, so she went out to do that.  I put Mom to work with me applying and then stripping wood with the chemical goop (technical term there).  I had my Dad take one of the cheap plastic scrapers that I bought and shape it to fit a curved profile that we're going to have to scrape soon, then put him to work with my new sander (a Bosch 1297DK 1/4 sheet pad sander) and the MultiMaster on the other window in the room.  His job was to get it prepared for finishing.  When Jenny came home, I had her help my Mom on one side of the pocket door frame, while I continued to work on the other side.  My parents were getting ready to leave, but Dad still had a little bit of energy, so I had him put the first coat of shellac on the other window.  It looks great!  After they left, I asked Jenny if she'd make some iced tea, and I finished-up the stripping that we had started, and scrubbed-down the areas we worked with mineral spirits. 

Now we're relaxing, still running the fan to exhaust some of the stripper fumes. 

Thanks parental units for helping (and taking more pictures from today:  Check out the gallery!). 

jonathan

We needed some sleep this morning, so we slept-in a bit.  We were up and moving by 10AM, though.  The first job for today was to get the one chair from the room and move it "someplace else."  That someplace else ended up  being the front porch for the moment, but that's fine--I posted both of those swivel rockers on Pittsburgh freecycle, so hopefully they'll wander away soon.  They are still in pretty good shape, but we just have too much furniture.  The plan all along was for these to disappear when we moved our "new" furniture into the living room, so now seems like a good time to get them gone.  We didn't have room for both chairs in our temporary living space, so one of them had to stay in the room.  It was getting to be a pain working around it, so out the door it went. 

Next was some general clean-up in the room.  Jenny had been working in there a few times over this week while I've been doing the show, but I never really did a good clean-up after we got the front window reinstalled.  This was a good time to do that. 

Next was putting the carpet back down around the perimeter of the room.  What's that, you say?  Why did we do that?  Well, we plan to get rid of the carpet when we're done anyway, so we might as well save some money and use it as our drop-cloth and floor protector while paint stripping and painting.  The plan is to get working on the chemical stripper all over the place now, so it was a good time to get the drop cloth (read:  carpet) back in place.  There are a few places where it doesn't reach, but I'm not too worried about that right now.  Those places are where the heat registers go, etc., so they're going to be covered again soon anyway. 

After all that was finished, I noticed that there was a small area of the window sill for the smaller window that we had not stripped yet with the heat gun.  We use the smaller window to contain our fan, so this is the area where the fan normally sits.  It was a pretty small area, so I opened the window a bit to get some airflow, and fired-up my heat gun.  Most of that stripped off pretty easily.  Then, I got to work applying the stripper (Strypeeze, for those who are wondering) to the frame and trim of that window.  That took a while to get slathered appropriately.  I took a break for about ten minutes after that, then came back and started cleaning off the stripper in the order that I had applied it.  This stuff works like gangbusters, and the wood cleaned-up pretty well.  There are a few crevices that are being a pain in the rear, but I don't know how much effort I'm going to expend on those.  I can't see them on the big window anymore, so they seem to disappear pretty well.  I'm trying to do this window well so that we don't go through so much sandpaper when sanding time comes (which should be tomorrow for this window, actually!).  I also own a set of hand scrapers of various sizes and curves, and I think I might try to use them to do some of the work prior to sanding.  I use them for woodworking projects, and they leave a surface much nicer and with less dust than sandpaper.  I don't know if I'll be able to get all the tiny curves and stuff with them, though, so we'll have to see. 

Speaking of sanders, the Craftsman ROS developed some issues that I noticed when I was finishing the big window last weekend.  Specifically, when not in contact with a surface, the sanding pad starts to spin at high speed.  If the pad is brought back in contact with wood at this point, it generates a giant dish-out and circular marks, which is not cool.  Using my jeans to slow the pad before bringing it back to wood works, but is far from ideal.  I need to call Craftsman about that.  It's my Dad's sander, though, so I should probably get my own for projects here.  I think I'm going to pick up a 1/4 sheet "finish" sander.  These sanders can be used with any type of paper, really, to make them as aggressive as one wants them to be.  They excel at getting into corners and edges of flat surfaces the way that ROS units just can't match, and can be used for really fine sanding, if desired.  I think I'll do that after church tomorrow. 

Tomorrow, my Mom and maybe Dad are coming down to help us.  Lots of stripping and hopefully some sanding are the order of the day.  We're getting closer. 

jonathan

... at least as done as it is going to be this time around.  It was a busy push until the end, but we did it!  The trim and frame managed to get three coats of shellac, which seems to be enough.  Looking at it up-close after everything was said and done, I think that it would have benefited from a fourth coat, but time wasn't going to favor us in that regard.  Jenny and I think that it looks good, though. 

We went to breakfast at Eat 'n' Park this morning, then went to church.  We saw my parents there.  They were making hamburgers later today, so they said they'd bring us food later.  That was one less thing that we had to worry about today, which was good.  When we got home from church, I sanded and put another coat of shellac on the frame and trim (that was to be its last--coat #3).  I then went to fetch my furniture paste wax and application material, and brought that upstairs.  I wanted to make sure that the whole window sash and friction points on the frame had a good coat of wax on them to keep the shellac from sticking. 

While the wax was setting, I went outside and put some stripper on some of the trim parts from around the transom.  These still had a few sticking bits of paint that I wanted to remove before getting them ready for reinstallation.  They weren't necessary for today's work, though, so they were not high-priority. 

While those parts were stripping, I went back in to buff the wax coat.  Wow.  That really made the sash look sharp.  I might put it on all the trim, simply because I like the finish that it left.  By the way, for the skeptics:  Paste wax, when applied correctly, does not build-up.  It is a film finish that is not additive.  When one applies more wax at any point in the future, the buffing process removes any extra wax, leaving behind wax only where the original coating had worn away.  I can't speak for the "wax" in the spray can--I use old-fashioned paste wax from a can, and apply it with a pad made by wrapping a ball of the wax in a gauze-like fabric, then buff it with a lint-free cloth.  It looks great, and is easy to maintain. 

At this point, the sash was pretty much ready for reinstallation.  The shellac had been dry on the frame and trim for a while, the wax was buffed, and everything was ready to go.  I decided to take a rasp to the inside edge of one of the frame members that had been a serious sticking point (literally) for sash movement.  I took off a little wood there, applied some additional wax, and buffed it again.  It was time for window installation. 

I didn't want to bother my wife, who was doing other housework at the time, so I decided to give it a shot myself.  It turned out to be easier than I had expected, which was good.  I got the chains re-attached and the sash in place, and went to try to move it, and...  woosh!  It worked.  And it worked amazingly well.  The biggest problem was that it was heavy to close, and it wants to open by itself a bit.  I suppose the window has lost some weight over the years, with the wood drying out more, and probably with the little bit of wood that we removed in sanding.  If that's the only problem that we have to deal with on that window, I think we're doing well. 

After cleaning it with a few applications of denatured alcohol and then Windex, it looks pretty darn good.  I need to take a razor blade to a few spots on the glass that got a bit of shellac on them (the denatured alcohol is a shellac thinner, but there were some heavier deposits that didn't seem to want to leave), but that will have to happen later.  I also decided to put one of my little pins back into the one chain to keep the sash closed.  I put stripper on the original brass latches, but they're going to need some additional attention to make them functional again.  Removing the weight on one side of the sash is enough to keep it closed, so we'll leave it like that for the moment. 

Right after I finished getting the sash reinstalled, my Dad arrived with food.  Yay!  Food!  He came with additional food goodies, too, besides the burgers.  Yum.  So we chatted with him for a while and ate.  After we were done, I went in and cleaned-up most of my reinstallation mess.  There are a few places that need some touch-up shellac after reinstalling some of the stop moulding, but that's easy to do.  At this point, I was dead tired, so I stopped for the day.  Jenny went in and washed most of the walls tonight, in preparation for getting paint on the walls. 

This week I have a show to do, so I'll be busy every evening.  We'll be working Saturday and Sunday on the room again.  This time, we're going to be going full-blast with the chemical stripper on as much woodwork as we can in the room.  It would be awesome if we could get most of it done then.

(a very tired) jonathan