China Cabinet

My new stripping project is the built-in China Cabinet. This cabinet is kind of neat. It spans two rooms, a small room that was probably the pantry part of the old house, which is probably why it is so named and the dining room, so you can put a plate in from the pantry side and take it out on the dining room side. The drawers do the same. There is also two doors that at one time they slid the food from the pantry to be served in the dining room.

The outside of this project too is varnished. I haven't yet stripped much paint (not counting the porch), just varnish. This doesn't have layers and layers of varnish. It looks like only one layer that is in bad need of removal. One thing I have learned is that stripping is actually easier when there is many layers, one layer doesn't give you the long crispy strips it just kind of gets crumbly. After cleaning it with Methal Hydrate it often looks like this.

With much picking, scrapping. The doors and drawers look like this.

These to will be stained with Minwax Ipswich Pine and I will post the results.

Nancy

Down in the Depths

Clarke began his adventure into the basement to begin our newest challenge of shoring up the beams. As with just about every job we have taken on so far, before you can even begin you must clear out 100 years of garbage. So once that is done you can begin the task you set out to do.

It is obvious that when this part of the house was built, there were no building codes. Each beam in the basement was small by today's standards, 2 x 5 and was riddled with holes from the multitude of wires. He supported each of them with a 4 x 4 hemolock beam. (always helpful to have a sawmill in your backyard for such projects)

He had to replace a supporting beam that was broken and twisted with a 6 x 6 beam. It is really amazing how strong even a broken beam could be because it had supported a very heavy wood cookstove for years.

After the tedious task of shoring up all the beams and figuring out good wires from old, the kitchen no longer bounces when you walk on it. The sag went from 2'' to almost level . Maybe I can put ceramic tile under the cookstove!

Nancy

Digging Deeper

When we started doing the kitchen we at first didn't think we would have to tear it apart but as the further we got into this restoration the more we saw that it would be a more complete job if we remove the drywall from the ceiling instead of just covering it over with new drywall. Then we decided that the walls also needed to come down to run new electrical and heat to the living space above that its only heat source was a hole in the ceiling of the kitchen. So basically the kitchen is gutted.

One very important thing we discovered by removing the ceiling was that the small 2 x 5 inch joists were not strong enough to hold up the floor above and there was a sag in the center of the ceiling of 1 2/3 inches. Which has begun the research into how to best shore up those joists. We are leaning toward placing a steel or lamenated beam perpendicular to the joists the length of the kitchen and then cover them and try to make them look like they belong.

Maybe we shouldn't have been suprised by this because we knew that the kitchen floor was sagging because of a broken, literaly twisted main beam and those same small 2 x 5 joists riddled with electrical, telephone and whatever that needed to go through them, but we felt those were the reason for the the floor sagging. The joists for the second floor have none of those problems and it is sagging. So before we can continue in the kitchen we have to correct our bad case of the sags.

Nancy

Working Smarter?

After spending months stripping one wall of wainscotting I really wasn't looking forward to the other wall which is about 10 feet long. One day Clarke decided to take some of the wainscotting off the wall and send it through the planer. Eureka! Cleaned it up perfectly. It took off all the varnish without taking much wood, leaving no sticky mess.

In a matter of 2 hours we had the 10 feet done and all the door casings.

I at this point have mixed emotions. Joy because of how quick and easy that was and that I didn't have to spend hours stripping it but also grieved me because of the hours that I had already spent.

I think this is just something I am going to have to live with as we go through this adventure.

Hey but we are on a roll....just a small one don't get too excited!

Nancy

Ok I have been bummed

Over the last few months I didn't feel I had anything to blog about. I felt that every entry would be the same. .... Today I stripped the wainscotting, still on the same wainscotting, you know that wainscotting I am still at it. It just seemed never ending and didn't seem very interesting. It just seemed that everything had ground to a halt.

This piece of wainscotting is about 20 feet long with many layers of varnish. Clarke had wanted to just sand it and re-varnish but I said no that it had to be stripped to look any good. We had decided to strip it still attached to the wall because we weren't sure that we could successfully remove it without ruining it. I was using a heat gun because I didn't feel I could manouver the silent paint remover with the wainscotting still on the wall. When I began to strip the boards I would get a crispy strip of varnish but then there was a layer of some very sticky stuff left on the wall. At first I thought it was the varnish just getting sticky from the heat but the more I was fighting with this sticky mess more distressedI was getting. Thinking that I was in way above my novice capabilities and that maybe Clarke was right and we should have just sanded. After researching some solutions to this sticky mess I began to think that maybe what was so sticky was shellac. Many blogs suggest using Denatured Alcohol, so I set out to find it. Well I don't know if you can find it in Canada but you can't find it in Fredericton New Brunswick. Every place I went and asked for Denatured Alcohol the response was always the same, nope never heard of it. I am pretty sure that some clerks thought I was making it up. So I began to search for what I could use to replace Denatured Alcohol and I found Methyl Hydrate, bought a jug and brought it home. Low and behold it got rid of the stickiness. So we began a cycle of strip, strip, wipe, wipe and finally the wall was clean.






I was sooooo excited because I began to truly believe that I would die stripping that wall. I then stained the wall with Minwax Ipswich Pine. It turned out so nice.


It is kind of hard to see how beautiful it looks but believe me it looks very nice. Now we are trying to decide if we are going to varnish. Presently varnish is a dirty word to me.


I am offically unbummed.

Nancy