Procrastinator

Since returning from my California vacation I haven't done anything to the house except my normal housecleaning. Once you clean up the mess (which I always do before a vacation) you hate to start working and creating another mess.

But I have been busy. I launched my new personal website that I'm pretty pleased with. I'm going to set up another one like it for this blog. It should go a lot faster now that I kind of know what I am doing. With the new website, my pictures and blog will be together and organized with pages of video, also. Which reminds me that I promised a video on applying shellac. I hope I can deliver.

But for now, at least today, it isn't raining or snowing and the temperature isn't freezing and you know what that means.....see ya on the water fishing!

Keep It Original, But I Want That!

I am a person that totally appreciates keeping things original in an old house unless it can't be repaired or brought back to life. For about 6 years I have posted comments on different message boards and blogs how I feel about it.

The first time I had to eat my words was when we decided we had to put in a patio door and deck in order to have access to the back yard, as small as it is.

Second, is when I had to strip the old finish off of the woodwork because the top layer was peeling like dried egg whites (previous owner top coated shellac with old wax on it with water-based I conclude). I replaced it with the same original material, shellac, but went darker.

Our upstairs has original heart pine woodwork, never painted in all of its 90 years (except the bathroom). I want to redecorate the bedroom into a cottage style but the yellowish, brown color of the woodwork, though beautiful, doesn't look good with the whites, creams and blues I want. The woodwork would look really nice a cream color.

The woodwork needs to be sanded down because of the same egg-white peeling problem the downstairs had. Being it has to be stripped someday anyway because of this peeling, I'm thinking I may become the person I despise the most, the person that paints over original wood (heart pine, am I crazy?).  I'm not having too much problem with this, because there is shellac underneath that would make stripping the paint off later with a heat gun quite easy.  If I do this, I'll be such a hypocrite.

Picture of Medium Sheen Waterlox on Oak

Here is a picture of how shiny the "medium sheen" Original Waterlox turned out on my white oak woodwork. I have multiple coats of the dewaxed, garnet shellac first to build up the color and then 3 hand rubbed coats of the Waterlox Original. It was still too shiny, I thought. So I have added another coat with some flattening agent added to it that I haven't taken a picture of yet. I'll take pictures of the finished product when I'm done.

Anyone Use Waterlox On Their Floors?

Soon I'll have to order a finish for my stripped oak floors. Originally they were shellac but I couldn't save it as the foam under the 50(?)-year-old carpet was ground into it in a lot of places. I have cats and on occasion they "yak-up" on the wood floors so I'm thinking I may use something else.

I think Waterlox is suppose hold up better than shellac. I don't like polyurethane floors. My shellac floors and stairs were not very slippery and that is the other big issue.

Anyone have Waterlox floors, are they slippery? Are they holding up well to foot traffic?