After I finished the previous week, I had the built-in bench in pretty good shape with a few coats of dyed shellac. I needed to get the built-in a shade darker, but overall seemed like I was on the right path.

Then I decided to get fancy and things went wrong. The first problem was trying to tinker with the shellac formula by putting in some reddish dye into the mix. I kept maple as the the bulk of the color, but then blended in some Cuban Red Mahogany which I thought would give the color a slight orange tint. I’m happy with the maple, but at times I think the existing pine has a little reddish/orange tint that I felt I wasn’t capturing.

After I applied the new dyed shellac, it definitely gave the bench a reddish hue which took it away from matching the room. At this point I thought to give up and just let the piece cure for a week and start rubbing the finish out with sandpaper and steel wool to reduce the gloss. Maybe at that point the reddish hue would diminish. But as I was giving the piece a final once over, I noticed a few areas that had some flaws in the finish. I attempted to smooth them out with some more shellac and here’s where I got into trouble.

As I as applied new shellac, the old finish melted as shellac will do, and I started applying the finish too hard and heavy to try and smooth out the flaws. This ended up washing away all of the dyed area and exposing the lighter wood underneath. As I washed away the color, at the edge I would have extremely dark lines from the shellac bunching up. I then tried to feather things out which only then expanded the range of my bad repair. Next thing I know, a quarter of the board is now missing color.

The problem was that I was trying to repair the shellac finish too quickly. Since each application of the finish melts the previous coats and then re-hardens with the new coat, you can’t make drastic fixes. The coats need to be slowly be built up with patience. I walk away from the bench and will come back to it next week when I’m less rushed.

I do have some success with the magic of the crockpot for restoring old hardware. In trying to keep the house as original as possible, I noticed hardware for roller shades on the 3rd floor windows. With the beadboard walls and ceilings, I thought that roller shades with Arts and Crafts stencils from Melton Work Room would be a good fit. I ordered the shades before installing, I took down the original hardware to remove all of the years of white paint gumming them up.

I soaked the hardware in the crockpot for a few hours and then brushed off all of the paint with a wire brush. A little bit of 3-in-1 oil and they are good as new.