Stripping.... A New House First

 January 2011

 

After the holidays.  We were all a little whipped.  Josh and Gus took a well deserved rest.  I on the other hand, seemed to be itching for even more work. sick? I decided to take on our dining room built-in.  Ever since we bought the house I was thinking about stripping it back to bare wood and staining it.  Most of the houses in our neighborhood are older then our house.  These houses are all filled with beautiful unpainted woodwork that I have been very jealous of.

I decided I would start with the top of the built-in and go from there.  The most interesting and frustrating part was that someone had covered the top of the built-in with contact paper.  Contact paper with a fake wood grain.... yay it was a trip.  What was not a trip was the fact that it was REALLY stuck to the cabinet.  It took me a whole day just to peel it off in small centimeter long strips.  Once I got to the painted surface I started putting on the stripper.  I painted it on and covered it with plastic wrap and left it for 24 hours.  When I came back the next day.  I was able to remove two-three layers of the paint.  Unfortunately, there was another two layers of paint under that!   This was going to be slow going!

Once you start a project you can't stop.  I learned from my first pass and thickly covered the wood this time. Around this time, I also realized my built-in had always been painted.  There was no stain or varnish as I got down.  I worried about the inaccurancy of me stripping this bare.  Did houses in the 1920's even have wood showing?  At the same time, I was looking a one solid 8 foot long 1" thick slab of beautiful old growth douglas fir with absolutely no knots or grains. In the end, my love for wood won out.  I decided to compromise. I would strip and seal the top of the buit-in but leave the bottom painted.

Two weeks, and three passes with the stripper and I had removed all the paint from the top of the cabinet.  I would not recommend this project to most people.  I have what is often considered an obsessive attention to small detailed projects.  In fact, I often get overwhelmed with the big picture, so this worked great for me.  Everyday afterwork I stripped a small segment and applied more stripper to sit overnight.  Josh understandably had no interest in taking on this mountain and left me to it.

Adults Have Dining Rooms... Now I Do!

July 2010

 

It was now July and we had moved into the dining room.  I want to start by saying this is my favorite room in the whole house. It was probably one of the reasons I agreed to buy the Castle.  The room is almost a square, which is my favorite shape for a room.  There are two large windows on the East and a set of small English Cottage style casement windows (you know the ones you see on Masterpiece where the farmers wife puts her head out the window and calls everyone in for supper, those kind).  The room has an original built-in and a small arch over the windows.  This is probably too much information, but I am an architect and I get excited about these things. 

 

I wanted to make the dining room feel intimate and cozy, the kind of place you can sit with friends after dinner for a long time.  We decided to go with a warm dark chocolate color in the space.  This ended up being harder then we thought.  Did we want a blue brown, a red brown, or a purple brown... ummm kinda just wanted dark chocolate.  In the end, we chose Benjamin Moore Barista and I am very happy about it.  This room had a lot of damage to the trim work and we ended up tenting the doorways off and sanding for many many days.  This was also the point in the project where we stopped hand sanding and bought an orbital sander... why we did not do this earlier? I can't really tell you, but it makes life o so much easier.

 

After a week of sanding we got about priming everything in the room and applied the Barista, it went on like fudge.  It was so delicious looking I felt tempted to eat it several times when it dripped on my fingers. Over share, maybe? This is a much smaller room than the living room and only required two coats, phew. We removed the tenting and got to work painting out the trim each night. I was really excited to see this room happen because we have never had a dining room and it felt very grown-up to have one.  Also, its right off the family room and I have to look at it every day.