With my rental dates pushed out a few weeks, I add stripping another door molding to my list of tasks for the cottage. I have to finish cleaning the porch and kitchen, but after that there isn’t much to do in the bathroom since I don’t have the medicine cabinet to install. I have the doors to re-install on the bedrooms, but I’m going to hold off on the door on the bedroom that has a floor being refinished. The other bedroom is ready for installation, but last year I didn’t strip the molding for the door because at the time the door was still painted white.

Now that I have a nice natural wood door, the white painted molding is the last vestigage of the previous look of the room. I feel pretty confident in stripping wood so I go for it to get all of the wood stripped and stained this weekend. I use my standard process of starting with the Speedheater to get off the bulk of the paint. After that I follow up with 2 applications of Citristrip to scrub off the smaller chunks of paint. I then wipen things down with turpentine and do a final hit with a dental pick to get all of the last bits out. Then I use artist oil paints to cover up any remaining white blotches. I’m not in love with the oil paints because they do take forever to dry and I feel they smear when the shellac is applied. In the future, I may try swapping out with acrylics to see if those dry better.

After the oil paint and turpentine wash dries, I apply the Minwax stain that I used for the rest of the molding (1 can English Chestnut with 1 tablespoon Red Mahogany). I let that dry and then next week, I’ll shellac the molding and hang the door.

In the bathroom, I only have the main task of rubbing out the shellacked door. The door is very shiny so I’ll rub it out with sandpaper and mineral oil followed by steel wool and brown wax. I’m still not won over by using sandpaper and mineral oil on shellac. I feel like it makes the shellac cloudy and it doesn’t seem to work very well. I wrap the sandpaper around a sanding block and like an idiot, I don’t cover all of the block causing me to strip off some of the finish on 1 part of the door. I fix the issue, but now I need to re-coat that 1 part of the door. I rub out 80% of the door leaving that 1 piece for repair.

Last year I learned my lesson about trying to rush shellac repairs so I stay patient and slowly apply many thin coats of dark shellac to cover up the stripped finish. OK, small setback, but still on a good pace to finish up early and maybe finally hit the beach this year. Before wrapping up, I take a look at part of the shiplap that I didn’t hit completely with a 2nd coat of linseed oil paint. The color is slightly different and its right where the shiplap meets the ceiling. To play it safe, I put some “delicate surface” masking tape on the ceiling to protect against any blue paint getting on the white ceiling. I delicately apply the blue touch-up paint and then peel off the tape to get ready to hit the beach.

As I peel off the delicate surface tape, I notice a blotch of purple appear. The delicate surface tape is taking off the top layer of the sheetrock! I get the rest of the tape off with minimal damage, but the bulk of the destruction has already occurred. After cursing the tape and seeing my beach time disappear, I go back to the cupboard to see what primers I have. I start with a triple thick primer that is supposed to build up a surface. It goes on, but just as I remembered last time I used it, it doesn’t seem to thick at all — it feels watery and thinner than any other primer. I go with that anyway and then move to a standard water-based primer to start covering up the ripped sheetrock. I get a few coats down, but have to wait 30 minutes between them, so I start messing around with pine tarring an outside decoration to kill the time.