A Shellacking Great Weekend!

If you think that all I do is neighborhood projects these days then you are mistaken. I spent the better part of three days, count them, one, two, three, shellacking a floor AND 35 pieces of 12 foot beadboard! After inhaling all those alcohol fumes from 1.5 gallons of clear shellac applied to the parlor floor to produce this;



I got to use another 2 quarts of amber shellac on these;



and these;



When that was all done, I got to put two coats of spar urethane on all this beadboard.

What is all the beadboard for? I'll elaborate in the next post. If you need a clue though, how about this "Got Pigeons?"

The Neighborhood Project

This is now 99.8% complete! After 3 weeks of non-activity I mustered up a few volunteers this Sunday to make the final push! There is a 4 foot section of lime green soffit to paint and the frame around the sign needs to be done. About 2 hours or less of work on a tall ladder. We are also having some period movie posters reproduced to slap over some of the gray areas. I'm sure his will be finished in the next two weeks! I'm sure that I will be the one on the ladder!



The total cost of materials was $260.00. Most of which was paint. I donated a bag of concrete, a bag of lime and half a bag of sand to the project but that adds only about $12.00 to the material cost. A local Home Depot was supposed to donate a $50.00 gift card but after 2 months of waiting for it we decided to proceed from our own account. I'm betting that we will still be waiting for it in July! In case you can't remember why we did this, here is a picture of how the building has looked since 1983.



Someone recently made a comment to me. He said that we don't have a right to live in a safe nice neighborhood, we have a responsibility. Therefore, don't go crying to the City everytime you want something fixed. The City would not have fixed this problem as good as we did. Let's face it, their employees are not creative enough, yet.

"The times, they are a changing....."

The Neighborhood Tour...

And the best thing is, I didn't have to write it! I found that someone linked to My Website through this post.

There is even a picture of the "Crackhouse".

There are a few errors. Our neighborhood boundries are bigger than depicted and some of the history isn't quite correct, but who cares unless you are living here and then again do you really care if you are reading this and do live here?

This Floor Really Sucks.....

Ok, so how many of you are thinking that this post is really about me screwing up the parlor floor and that is the only reason you clicked on this post? You should all realize by now that the odds of that happening are pretty slim these days. Ha! Fooled you all! What I am meaning to say is that this floor really sucks up the linseed oil!

This parlor room was added on to between 1887 and 1892 when Herman Volkenand bought the place and was Victorianising it to his liking before he moved into the house. To those whacky Volkenands, the solution was to put down new floor boards butted against the old ones. That was fine except that the old boards are ash and the new boards are yellow pine. When I perform my shellac magic on this floor, the ash boards will come out amber in color and if I am good, the pine boards will look like they do in this picture. They are the boards on the far half of the room. Otherwise, they will be very orange. I can always tint the shellac as a last resort.
This picture was taken tonight after the day was spent sanding the floor repairs and the baseboards. Then vacuuming, lots of vacuuming. This is how it looks after a coat of linseed oil/paint thinner mix and gives you an idea of how it will look when finished. It would be stupid to stain this floor because the difference in the woods would be more pronounced.




If you look carefully you can see my repairs. The big snafu was using a board from the second floor to repair a termite damaged board near the right window. When I did flooring repairs on this place a couple of years ago, I used boards from the second floor hall and bathroom to replace damaged or missing boards of similar width (the floor boards are not equal widths) on the first floor. All the wood was covered in shellac or crud so it wasn't until the floors got sanded that we noticed a distinct dark color on the second floor planks! In this room I only used the one board and it won't stand out when the floors are done so I won't have to paint it or mask it in any way. There are some repairs in the center of the room too. There used to be a big plywood square where a heating grate once rested and there were two electrical boxes in the floor when this building was apartments and there was a walk in/through closet in this room.
You can tell where the floor rug was! Actually, once we put a rug down you won't notice the wood floor. Your eyes will draw to the rug. We realized this when we put the rug down in our bedroom (the room above this one) where the difference in wood flooring is more noticable. Although it is kind of annoying to have the floor this way there is one great advantage. When sanding it I was able to start in the center and work towards the walls. This eliminates the ridge that forms about two feet from the wall where you put the sander down and start walking. I should have this floor finished by next weekend. Then I stop work on this room for a while and get to work on the laundry room and put a beadboard ceiling on the balcony. Oh lucky me......


P.S. Did you notice that the grafitti is gone? Three coats of Killz couldn't thwart it. It took a coat of shellac to entomb it forever in the walls! Now I have to hide the shellac marks and one coat of Killz hasn't quite done it.....

More Auction Madness!

We spent another Sunday at Woods Auction this weekend. Deborah spent lots of money this time. We got a bunch of stuff for the house so we can't complain. The prices were better than fair. We feel that we did very well with our acquisitions.
First off, Deborah always wanted an Empire chest of drawers. We got this monster for $160.00.



The 4 foot level shows the scale. This thing is huge! It must weigh near 200 lbs without the drawers.We didn't realize how big it was until we put it in the bedroom. A neighbor helped me carry it up the stairs and we almost lost it near the top. We put a good ding in my finished door frame but considering that it almost went over the banister rail, that is an acceptable price to pay.

I took Elizabeth outside because she wanted to run around. After some 10 sprints across a field to a tree we went back in and found that Deborah had bought 5 Persian rugs. The largest one was 11' X 9' and cost the most at $275.00. These were wool/cotton rugs made in Iran. Worth alot more than what we were paying. Here is a picture with the 3 smallest ones laid out in the bedroom. The largest 2 are rolled up in the living room and covered with plastic until I am done with sanding the floor.



I actually spent $40.00 and bought this 4 pc. Eastlake parlor set that needs to be re-upholstered. That is a good rainy day project for the future.



We couldn't keep Elizabeth still until we bought her this metal pig (picture taken later at home).



After that she sat quietly on it for the rest of the auction with a huge smile on her face. I have since mounted it on a plywood board with a piece of galvanised pipe like a carousel animal. I would like to find a spring to mount it on for her. Probably the best $45.00 we spent!

There were a few other things we got but by far the best thing was this Victorian hanging library lamp which will go in the parlor.



It is all original but has been wired for electric. Which is fine by me. After I got it home, cleaned all the dust off of it and oiled the pull down chain mechanism I saw the B & H and what appears to be an 1860s patent date on the mechanism. (I will have to check that out some day.) This would indicate that it is a Bradley and Hubbard lamp. That makes it more valuable because it authenticates it's age. A reproduction lamp like this will cost some $400.00. We got it for less! This is probably a $1000.00 lamp. It won't be installed for a while though. We have to get the walls and ceiling painted first. We have been looking at these for 5 years and quite expected to pay at least $700 for one if we wanted it bad enough. Never thought we would get a Bradley and Hubbard though! We now have most of the lighting purchased for the Crackhouse. Most of it was bought at flea markets and auctions.

So You Want to Sand Your Floors?

Do you want to sand your floors but don't know what to do? Well here is what you need to know but were unwilling to ask! This task is not for the whimpy ones who are afraid to get blisters, sore knees or aching backs. Girly men should pay real men (or women) if this is the case but consider this; the last time I looked into getting a floor sanded (1998) it was $800 just to sand the floor. No stain or varnish! I have no idea what it would cost now. The material cost to sand a floor with a rental would be around $250 assuming you keep the equipment for two days and use a floor sander, an edger and you buy the sandpaper from the rental company. You could cut the time to one day but you will have to do good preparation.

First, you should consider stripping any molding smoothing any walls and at least getting the walls painted with primer BEFORE you sand the floors because it would be such a shame to ruin the floors after you spent so much time making them look good. Anything falling on the floor or paint spills will be sanded out so make the mess before sanding.

Pull out any nails or carpet tacks that you can and those that won't come out need to be sunk below the surface of the wood with a hammer and nail punch. Nails will rip through sand paper and can damage the pad of your sanding machine.

If your floors are painted or covered in glue or shellac you should consider trying to strip much of stuff off with a heat gun. This will take many hours to do. The other option is to sand the stuff off but it will gum up the sandpaper and you will spend as many hours stripping off more depth of wood than necessary and changing paper. Preparation is really the key to good looking wood floors.

There are three types of sanders. For refinishing an existing decent floor that has a few scratches you want one of those giant flat palm sanders they rent at Lowes or Home Depot. You can't do too much damage with one of these but you can't get a smooth level floor either if the boards are curved or warped.
There are rotary or disc sanders. I have never seen one but some of them double up as floor polishers. These sand with a circular motion and are a little more aggressive. Edgers are rotary sanders. I have never used a disc floor sander, only an edger and an angle grinder.
The most aggressive are drum sanders. This is a giant belt sander. You have to keep moving with one of these otherwise it will gauge your floor.

If you have more than one floor to sand and don't want to worry about pulling all-nighters to get the job done so you can return the rental equipment then you should seriously consider buying a used floor sander. We did that. The drum sander cost $650 from a rental shop. Paper for it can be bought online in packs of ten averaging around $1.50 a sheet for the coarse paper and $.95 for the fine papers. We can always sell the sander when we are done and get our money back. I also have a variable speed grinder/polisher that I bought to polish my concrete counters. I use it instead of an edger. I cut 7 inch discs from the spent drum sander paper to maximise my use of the paper and save money. I also use a palm sander for some of those hard to sand spots. Here is a picture of my arsenal.




Here is a floor that I am currently working on. The left side has had a single pass with 36 grit paper.



The grit size or # indicates how many "grits" there are per square inch. The higher the # the finer the paper. This floor is mostly unfinished and requires a #36, #60 and a #100 respectfully. You shouldn't need anything finer than a #100 or #120 grit for your final pass.

You should sand with the grain of the wood but you may want to make a couple of diagonal first passes if the floor is really rough or uneven. The diagonal passes cut the wood more and make levelling a much quicker process.

One end of this floor has shellac or some kind of lac paint on it. It was common to put shellac down arond the edges of area rugs. This makes sanding a messy process because it gums up the sandpaper. When this happens I get out the heat gun and start scraping. The stuff has to come off the floor and will either come off with the scraper or on the paper as a result of heat friction. Either way, the volume of goop is the same and the time taken to remove the stuff is about the same if you count the time it takes to change the sandpaper or scrape it off the sandpaper after it has cooled and hardened. In this particular case, I used the variable speed grinder to sand the remaining shellac after using the heat gun. The stuff is removed quicker if you actually allow the disc to gum up because the stuff on the floor is lifted off by sticking to the hot gooey stuff on the rotating disc. When most of the shellac was removed, I then went back to using the drum sander to do the job properly and thus reduced the amount of clogging on the drum sandpaper. Here is a picture of the problem area. The upper part is the shellac covered portion. The lower part has been sanded with both the grinder and then the drum sander with #36 grit paper.



If you are using rental equipment, this kind of unforeseen hang-up will slow you down and cause much stress. The frustration could add a day to your project or make you want to pack it in altogether and put down carpet.

Once you get passed the initial removal of crud and move on to the medium and fine sandpapers it gets much easier. When using a drum sander you can lift the handle, pushing the machine into the floor to apply pressure to hard to sand patches. You can also walk very slowly almost pulling back on the machine which wants to move forward. You must keep moving though and when you get to the edge of the floor you must push down on the handle to lift the drum off the floor otherwise you will get a ridge forming along the edges of the room that will have to be sanded out with the edger or grinder. I should have this floor done in a couple of hours on Thursday now that I have scraped up the shellac and have most of that portion finished with the grinder already.

Other tips;
If you have a window fan, use it. It will get much of the finest dust out of the air and stop it from settling in your house. If all else fails, there is always laminate flooring or wall to wall carpet....

After you have done a couple of floors this process won't phase you one bit. This is my 9th floor so I get quite bored with it any more. I figured it was time to divulge the information and "spread the love" so all you folks who haven't done this yet can get down and dirty and feel my pain!

Anyone Interested?

We are thinking about going to Brimfield in July. Anyone else thinking about going there?