Nothing too exciting to report for this week’s work. Still waiting for the bedroom floors to get refinished before I can finish off that room. For the bathroom, I’m waiting for a medicine cabinet to be delivered from Etsy so I’m holding off decorating that until that last piece is in.

The bulk of this time is spent doing a deep cleaning of all of the rooms in the downstairs of the cottage. Luckily my previous summer’s renters were all tidy along with having a cleaning crew come in between change-overs, so there’s nothing terrible to deal with. But just having the cottage sit for a year empty, you still get dust accumulating and floors that need a good scrubbing.

While cleaning, I keep fussing with the woodwork in the bathroom. I’m still not in love with the colors on the door and the door molding. Last week I put down a burnt sienna glaze that was OK, but a little too red/orange. This weekend I start moving things back to a brown color by adding some oak dye to the shellac that I am using.

The molding also suffers from an orange hue that doesn’t quite match the molding around the window and floors. For that I try tinkering with tinting some linseed oil. I go with this approach because I already put down a coat of linseed oil last week. I have some oil artists paints and I mix in some colors into turpentine and then blend that into linseed oil. It gives things a slight tint, but it’s a bit too subtle. I go back to the light brown water stain used originally and apply 3 coats of that on the molding and that definitely gives a bigger change compared to the tinted oil.

I’ll let the door shellac cure for a week and then will rub that out and wax to de-gloss things. For the molding, I’m not sure if I want to shellac it or just apply wax over the oil finish.

Some other non-cleaning projects started this weekend were stripping some more bedroom molding and applying pine tar to the outside deck. The molding around the door in the original bedroom I renovated was painted white and I didn’t get to it last year. Because the door was still painted white, it didn’t look too bad. But now I have the doors restored back to wood finish, I wasn’t looking forward to hanging the wood door against white molding. I found out from my realtor that my rental dates were pushed out till the end of the month, so this gives me some buffer to strip, stain and shellac this molding before hanging the door.

Outside of the cottage, I have a wooden deck that is raw wood with no paint or stain on it. The deck holds the HVAC and it’s got a bunch of algae and dirt build-up. I’m able to clean up a portion of the deck and I try applying 2 coats of a 50-50 linseed oil and pine tar mix to the wood. I’ll see how this looks when I return next week and if it looks good, I’ll do the rest of the deck.