Last weekend I did a second coat of plaster on two of the walls, but my supply was getting low so I needed to stop progress and restock with more Master of Plaster. These two walls go fairly easily with some tricky areas around the wall with the closet. This wall had two large holes filled and also has a lumpy area from where a stove hooked into the chimney.

It takes me a few hours to plaster the wall and then to clean up some trouble spots, I mix in some extra fine plaster with the standard plaster to smooth out any gouges or rough spots. I make this plaster wetter by adding some water because I want it to spread thin to just fill in imperfections rather than be an actual coat. I also use the spray bottle on the walls to help burnish the plaster to a flat finish.

After a bunch of smoothing I get plaster in pretty good shape. I may do a second pass on the wall with the large holes to even things out a little more, but I’ll wait till next week to decide on that. With most of the plaster done, I go back to the woodwork in the room. I have some plaster splatters I need to clean off which I use a damp microfiber cloth. After that I do a rubdown of the finish with fine and then super find synthetic steel wool. The custom stain I make sometimes ends up having little bubbles in it. I can’t figure out why that happens, but I use the steel wool to rub those imperfections out. Also while working, if I notice any missed spots, I use an artist’s brush to fill in any missing stain. I get about 50% done with the woodwork sanding.

Outside of the plaster and woodwork in the room, I still have the two doors to deal with. The closet door was stained but there’s too many visible scratch marks that I need to sand out. I’m not motivated to mess with that so I keep plug away on stripping the main door. I coat each side with another layer of chemical stripper. For the most part the doors are clean but there’s still some white paint haze on the wood and in the corners and edges some blotches of paint left. I let the stripper sit for a few minutes and then use the scouring pads, dental picks, and a brass brush to remove the last of the paint.

After I’m done with the stripper, I start wiping things down using after wash and then denatured alcohol. The stripper is hard to get off, and it uses up a ton of paper towels to get all the gunk off.

With this door pretty much stripped, next up is fixing a hole in the door. Because the house was a rooming house, they cut in locks for every room. I won’t be needing that, so I plug up the lock hole using wood epoxy. I mix up the two liquids to prime the repair and then the two modeling compounds. I press that into the hole and also make a few other smaller screw repairs. The repair will sit for a week and then I’ll sand that down and start washing the door down with TSP and linseed oil soap.