Wood.....my refinishing addiction

One of the reasons I probably liked this house enough to buy it was the incredible woodwork in the living room/dining room that had never been painted. I'm one of those people who starts looking at woodwork immediately after entering a home.

My least favorite hacienda's--70's ranch style homes with tiny baseboard and trim, all rounded off at the top and painted white.

So, as we progressed through this house, from room to room fixing things as we could, woodwork always got a new look. No area of my house exhibits this like the hallway we have that runs from kitchen to the rear. For the most part, it is just doors--one to the bath, and one to three different bedrooms. It also has authentic bungalow "built-ins" which are great. But of course, when we bought the house all of this was painted, mostly white. The plaster walls were covered in painted over wallpaper. It all pretty much stayed that way until my wife got mad one day.

Believe it or not, she thankfully wasn't mad at me. She was angry enough to need a "physical" way to work out her anger, and had picked up my wallpaper stripping razor blade on a handle and gone at it. The hallway was full of wallpaper. By the time she finished, it was probably a foot high on the floor. She took a great deal of pride in it too. After she was done, the plaster crack and knick patching began. My Dad (very handy), helped me take all the baseboard and door trim off the walls. I labeled the boards, and pulled a lot of nails with a pair of vice-grips. Then I decided it was too much wood to strip with chemicals without harm to brain cells, so I bought a nice wood planer at home depot and started running the boards through. The wood is Douglas Fir, and some of it is flat grained, other pieces vertical grained. The flat grained stuff was harder, because it took a lot of sanding, and the wood was old enough that planing it sometimes set off some delaminating. But, it was one incredibly quick way to take paint off. For a bungalow with flat board trim, it works great.

I stripped the doors with a heat gun, then sanded like mad. I used amber shellac to put both color and finish back on the wood. The product is an old one, was used quite a bit in these Bungalows originally, and has a beautiful glow. 4 layers is the key, and they dry very fast. My wife painted the hallway walls and ceiling red, which we love. It is the antithesis of what that hallway looked like when we bought the house. We added lighting from Rejuvenation, and had an electrician put all the necessary wiring in to make it work on one switch.

I've done this process in 3 bedrooms and this hallway, and I used it on the house my Mom bought here in Provo, though with a different finish. I've added an edger, and a sanding center to my collection of power tools to speed this process up. My house is full of shining beautiful wood, but I sure pity those whose homes aren't.