Staining wood trim
With the floors scheduled to be finished during the week, the goal for this weekend is to finish stripping the white paint on the window sill and then patch, stain, and shellac the wood trim. To strip the rest of the paint on the window sill, I start with the approach that seems to have given the best results:
Start with scraping off the bulk of the paint with the Speedheater tool.
Coat the wood with CitrusStrip and then cover with saran wrap for a few hours.
Remove the stripper with of scrapers, dental picks, and scouring pads/rags dipped in mineral spirits and denatured alcohol.
Wipe down everything with a rag dipped in turpentine.
Rosettes removed and woodwork stripped.
The work is very tedious and takes a while, but eventually I finish. I then thin out some de-waxed shellac, and apply that to the stripped trim. I’m able to convince my brother and his girlfriend to go around the room and dab in some brown acrylic paint on any of the white spots I missed during stripping. There’s a lot of little nail holes, divots and other indentations where it’s difficult to scrape out all of the white paint so dabbing with brown paint is a good compromise.
After staining.
After the paint dries, everyone decides to go with a Minwax shade called English Chestnut the stain. I apply this to the baseboards and the new crown molding while they finish dabbing. There’s a couple of surfaces in play with the staining so I apply different amounts of stain to try to get all of the surfaces at the same shade.
Before staining the baseboard and crown molding.
After staining.
During the work on the window trim, I also removed the bullseye rosettes. There are 2 windows in the room. One has 4 rosettes and the other had 2 rosettes. The problem is that the window with 4 had 2 original rosettes and then 2 Home Depot models. The modern rosettes are an inch smaller than the originals. Also they were pre-primed so there wasn’t a nice stainable wood underneath. One of the common problems with modern woodwork is that the dimensions run smaller than in the Victorian era. Things like trim or porch balusters are now cut a little smaller than in the old days. You also see this with the shrinking of standard lumber boards where a 2x4 is now actually a 1.5x3.5.
Luckily there’s still some places that make trim and molding to original sizes and I found a small woodworking place in Maine that specializes in custom plinth blocks (Hartt Wood). Hartt sold me 4 rosettes with a design that is close enough to the original ones. I stain those and will install them on the windows next weekend.
New rosettes on the left and the originals on the right.
