Getting Sorted

Yeah.  Really.  It's really a little past four in the morning.

I've been down the basement till just a little bit ago, sorting out trim.  I needed to dig out every piece that goes back into the stairhall on both floors, so they can be shellacked prior to remounting.  While I was at it, I filled holes and cracks and gouges with Zar wood filler.

I'd likely still be at it, except I was so clever Wednesday afternoon when I went to the hardware store in New Brighton and bought only a 4 ounce container of the filler.  I didn't want it to dry out like my pint pot of it did.  Well, that plan worked.  It didn't dry out in the plastic pot.  No.  I ran out first.  And way before I'd gone through all the trim pieces, I can tell you.  And lot of those big nail holes will need a second application.  So I know what I'm going to be doing before the hardware store closes at 2:00 PM.

All this wood filling will mean sanding, of course.  I didn't mean to do much if any, really:  The Howard's Western Wood Doctor Refinisher leaves the wood with a nice, smooth surface.  But the Bosch orbital sander really helps; it was making short work of cleaning up a patch on a piece of really messed-up closet trim (the previous owners had obviously taken it down and cracked it at some point and I'd had to do my best to glue and clamp it back together).  But I saw I'd left a really big place unfilled, and had to glop the stuff in again and set the piece aside again.

The biggest problem with sanding is removing too much of the patina.  The final finish comes up so much better if it's left on.  with it.  But it'll help if I give every last piece a sealer coat of untinted buttonlac first.  Unlike what I forgot to do on the hallway floor.

But no shellacking got done this work session.  It was more like this:  Take a piece from the stack.  Wipe it.  Fill it.  Sort it into its own separate stack by room and/or which door or window it belongs to.  Run out of filler. Put the woodwork all back neatly, with the dining room and living room trim at the back, since it'll go in last.  Cogitate whether I should set any particular order for shellacking the 2nd and 1st floor hall trim, so all the pieces in each "suite" of trim for each door and window will be available as I want them for remounting.  Tell myself, good grief, look at the hour, you can think about that later!

Like after I run up to New Brighton tomorrow-- I mean, later today-- for more wood filler.

Is It Soup Yet?

I've been at this floor and stair shellacking business since the wee hours of December 13th.  Aren't I finished by now?



Well, maybe.  Not quite sure.

You see, one thing I always liked about the shellac finish on my upper staircase is the effect it gives, not so much surface-shiny-glossy, but that the wood is somehow under water, and you could reach down into the clear finish and touch the warm golden surface an inch or two below.

In October and November of 2010 it took me about ten coats of 1.5 pound cut Kusmi #1 buttonlac to achieve that, and regardless of color issues, when it came to the 2nd floor hallway floor and the main stairs down to the 1st floor, my resolution was to keep on adding coats of the untinted buttonlac until that's what I got.

Have I?

Well, I can say that watching the grain emerge more and more with each coat has been almost a poetic experience.  It's felt like each floorboard was a rough gem I was polishing, each with its own distinctive beauties, and I've been laboring to bring those beauties to light.

So has that been accomplished?

Maybe first I should say something about how I've been going about this project.  I have to laugh about all the stuff I bought eons ago to make the job easier and didn't use.  Like the lambswool pad and the three-part screw-in mop handle.  Ha.  Can you imagine me keeping any sort of control with that rig in my little L-shaped hall?  With my lousy eyesight?  Not to mention how much shellac it'd soak up and waste!  Instead, I chose to follow the advice given on a post here by Ralph the Woodworking Guy.  That is, I followed him as regards the sanding and wiping-down prep work, and especially as to the use of the 1" fine brush.  Two or three years ago I bought several good, if not luxurious, artist's brushes of various sizes just for the shellac work, and I had a  nice 1" model right at hand.

Well.  Early into the first coat (the one that should have been untinted-- sob!), I discovered what a blinking long time a 1" brush requires and how little shellac it actually carries to the surface.  Yeah, Mr. Ralph was probably working with skinny modern 2-1/4" floorboards.  Mine measure nearly 4" in breadth.  So I moved to a 2" brush of the same type and haven't looked back.

I think I'm getting better at the application, keeping the brush well-filled and making long, smooth strokes.  Ralph's recommendation is good, to do it floorboard by floorboard.  Works well in maintaining the all-essential wet edge, and the joints make a good boundary at the sides.  Though given how I filled the cracks with sliced-down strips of old disused floorboards, my floor is pretty tight and a little overlap was inevitable.  (*smiles*)  Standing up, you can't really see where the filler strips are, unless you're purposely looking for them.

I assuredly did not use the 2.5 pound cut he advises.  Yeah, I guess that'd give you good build in three coats, but I know myself and my brushing abilities.  I left enough weird streaks on the upper staircase with a 1.5 pound cut to try that.

No, this time I took to heart something said in a comment on The Prairie Box blog.  There Mr. (or Ms.) Anonymous recommended more coats in a 1-pound cut for quicker application and drying, and ultimately for a stronger, more durable floor.  Well, anybody who's successfully shellacked a floor in a house with "3 brutal cats" with claws is worth listening to.  I've also heeded his (or her) advice about the increased and increasing waiting times between coats.  For the upper stairs I only waited an hour or so between each coat.  And of course, I let myself and the four animals (brutal, with claws!) onto the finish way too soon.  Not going to make that mistake again!

Which is why it's over three weeks since I started this project, I've worked pretty steadily on it, barring four or so days at Christmas, and only today have I finished applying the sixteenth coat of shellac.

Yeah, ten-plus-six.  Sixteenth.  Hey, that would have been ten or so coats at a 1.5 pound cut, right?

But for whatever reason, I haven't yet achieved the "under water" effect I'm looking for.  I'm judging by the shellac's finish on a certain large piece of soft/open grain on one particular floorboard, and it doesn't look limpid and even with the hard grain next to it, it looks mottled and glisten-y.  What can be wrong?

Nothing, maybe, except different wood on the T&G boards than on the upper treads.  It's all yellow pine, but the treads are more close-grained.  And-- this is the kicker-- I don't have any artificial lights shining obliquely on the upper stairs, as I do in the hallway.  The fact that I couldn't get the effect I wanted was bugging me, so I took a light and shone it on the stair treads.  Yeah, in the stairwell I get some of the same glistening effect, though there I can't see it.

Which is why I'm saying Enough with sixteen coats.  On the hallway at least.  On the main stairs I really have glisten where I want limpidity, and I was thinking they were going to need four more coats, at least.

But maybe not.  I was on the Shellac.net FAQ page earlier this evening and it said something about rubbing-out.  Rubbing out?  On researching this, I find that that's what I really need to do to even out the finish and get the effect I want.  I think.  I've heard you don't want to make it too glossy, or every last (claw) scratch will show and scream.

Maybe I'll first experiment with rubbing out the main stair treads.  They look dull the way they are, whereas the overall effect in the hallway is just fine.  Very likely it won't gain me a thing to coat the main stair treads any more, and it might be counterproductive.

So can I say the shellacking on the stairs and hallway floor is done?

Maybe.  I'm not sure.  Because "everybody" says that dewaxed shellac is what you really need on top to shed water, and I have a nice can of Zinsser SealCoat I can use.  Or I can dewax some of the Kusmi.  But I recall Ron at Shellac.net telling me that the Kusmi #1 buttonlac is fine and hard for floors just as it is.  And really, once it'd had time to cure on the upper stairs it had no trouble resisting the wet snow the cable guys tracked in last January.  The water beaded right up.  And if I lay down a coat of dewaxed shellac, isn't there the likelihood that it'd just get rubbed off in the polishing process?

If I'm going to do the dewaxed, I need to get it applied tomorrow.  I definitely want to give the finish a good week or more to cure before I allow shoe and pet traffic on it, let alone think of rubbing it out.  And as it is the foam insulation people may well be coming to deal with the attic late next week.  So time is at a premium.

So is it soup yet?  Yes.  No.  Give it several more days to simmer.  But it's getting there!

Dark Reflections

Two or three weeks ago I promised to post pictures of the 2nd floor hallway floor shellacking I was finally, finally getting done.  Here they are, with commentary (including a great deal of whingeing and wailing):

The work commenced a little around a quarter to one AM on the 13th.  First step was to float a fresh coat of mahogany-tinted shellac over the stairs to the 3rd floor that I did a year ago October.  I made the mistake back then of letting the animals with their capers and their claws back onto the finish too soon, and in several places they'd scratched the treads to the bare wood:

With cat and dog scratches

What you see above is actually after I took some plain, untinted Kusmi #1 shellac to it and rubbed some of the worst of the scratches out.  Here the upper stairs are with the fresh coat:

Too dark and red

Now, I wouldn't take the evidence of my Canon PowerShot SX120 camera to convict a cockroach.  It knows nothing of accurate color-rendering, and it's useless for depicting degrees of sheen.  But this photo does testify true, first that the scratches were colored in, which is good, and second, that the color of the top shellac coat is too damn dark.

All this is what I get for failing to look for the scratchpad where I wrote down the proportions of mahogany and walnut dye to shellac a year ago.  As it happens, it wasn't actually up in my study where I thought I'd left it; no, that notepad has to be in the avalanche that is currently my guest bedroom, where I dumped everything before I started repainting the study in late August.  In any event, I didn't even try to look for the recipe when I mixed up the latest batch.  Instead I used a formula inverse to that I used to mix the walnut shellac for the trim in March (meaning, mostly mahogany with a smidge of walnut instead of vice-versa).  And even with that, I used less dye than the formula called for.  I thought it'd match.

So my first mistake was laying on that shellac at night, under insufficient light.  It wasn't till I got to the bottom treads down at the hallway that I noticed how dark the new color was, and how I'd merrily killed the golden-brown color I'd loved so much in those steps.

This I loved.  Too late now.

My next mistake was not drawing the obvious conclusion from the effect of the new shellac on the upper stairs. No, I was so keen to get things moving that I went ahead and used it on the floor. You'd think when I saw how reddish and dark it was on the first floorboards in the back of the closet, I'd dip a rag in the jar of alcohol, wipe it off, then go dilute the mix with more shellac and alcohol and start over.

But no, I had to keep going.

You'd think I'd remember that the first coat on the study stairs looked like this:

But somehow I thought it'd be All Right and marched-- I mean, brushed-- on.

This is where I left it around 3:30 in the morning on the 13th.  The camera with the flash makes it look more finished than it is.

But this isn't exactly accurate, either:

Since then, it's hit me that I made another mistake: I forgot that with fully-stripped and sanded wood with no patina, the first colored coat sets up so much better if an untinted coat is laid on first.  So even though I knew good and well by the next evening that what I had was too dark, in the following days I still had to lay on two or three more coats of mahogany-tinted shellac, though not half as strong, so the color wouldn't be just a watered-down burgundy red.

The next two days, the 13th and 14th, I finished the first coat on the hallway and brought it down the stairs. 

The second stage starts at the bathroom door

Then on in front of the upper stairs

Did this in 3 stages, to have a dry place to perch on

And if I thought looked watered-wine color up in the hallway, did it ever go red on the main stairs!

My friend Frieda* came by about the time I finished up the bottom tread.  She thought it looked "beautiful."  I'm trying really hard to take her word for it and so make the best of it.  Wiping it down and starting over wasn't an object once I got to this point-- too much damage to the walnut-shellacked risers and stringers.  I'll follow up with a post or two on how it looks now, two weeks later, with the caveat that my crummy camera is not to be trusted . . . And I'll promise to buck up and not whinge any more.  Really.

Announcement

Yes, it's as late as the date stamp says.

But I simply had to announce that after a long Monday of sanding, steaming out dents, more sanding, more steaming out dents, a whole lot of vacuuming and dusting, a wipe-down with denatured alcohol, and, oh yes, a little more steaming out of dents followed by more sanding and vacuuming, I finally got things in order with my 2nd floor hall and the main stairs to get some mahogany-tinted shellac onto the hall floor.

Ta-daaaaahhhhh!!

Only "some," because I began by applying a repair coat to the stairs to the 3rd floor, and I didn't start that till after 1:00 AM.   I then proceeded to lay a first coat onto half the hall.  Only half, because my upstairs hall is L-shaped and  I can't levitate and I don't want lap marks at the midpoints of the longest boards.  Besides, it was past 3:30 by the time I finished the first leg of the L, and if I get called in to teach in the morning that's rapidly approaching, I'm going to be a big slice of burnt toast as it is.

But after all this time, I thought it was only right for me to mark the occasion.  Pictures and commentary to follow.

Heading in the Right Direction

12:45 AM

     Here I am in the front room, contesting possession of the sofa bed with a very determined dog.

    Yes, I've finally, finally made the long-awaited move downstairs to keep me and the animals off the staircases and 2nd hall floor until they're refinished and cured.  No, I haven't finally, finally got any new shellac on the staircases and/or the 2nd floor hall floor. 

    I have vacuumed the whole lot, and used a dental pick to clean the cat hair out of the joints between the treads and risers of the set to the 3rd storey.  Those were wiped down with a damp washcloth and dried off, then I went over them lightly with 220-grit sandpaper.  Then wiped them off with a tack rag, then with the damp washcloth again.

    The cardboard and brown paper is off the hallway floor, and I see I have a darker strip at the bedroom door where the bare boards weren't covered all these months, as well as residue on the floor from the painter's tape I stuck the paper down with.  I gave those places a bit of a sanding, and it seems to be evening out.

    The joints to the steps down to the 1st floor I haven't defuzzed yet.  It was rising  midnight and I felt it was a good point to leave it.  Still had to pull out and make the bed.  And go down and get ready for bed in the basement bathroom for a change.  And try to convince the dog to let me into the bed at all.

    The fun thing will be sleeping with all the electric candles around this room.  And the glare from the neighbors' Christmas lights outside.

   Not to mention the cats making noise trying to find a way around the barriers I've erected in all the stairhall openings.  Never mind.  I'll deal with that in the morning.

Sometimes It's Good to Be Wrong

Tackled the attic insulation removal this afternoon and evening.  The process disabused me of a few false notions.

Starting at the back end, literally:  The knob and tube wiring I discovered yesterday is disconnected; it isn't live.  The receptacle I thought it served is wired up with standard white three-wire cable.  Nice not to have to be concerned about that.

(Incidentally, there's also a long disconnected strand of yellow three-wire cable [sorry, I should be able to remember the gauges of these things-- yellow is 12 gauge?  Or 14?  Oh, never mind!) on the back side of the knee wall; I uncovered it when I took a piece of cardboard tacked to the studs down, and happily, it's not live, either.  I think my electrician must've put that in; why didn't I have him connect it up?  I certainly could use another outlet under my work table!)

I was also wrong in thinking there was a lot of loose-fill rock wool between the batt insulation and the underside of the sheathing.  No, there was rock wool in there at one time; I could see little tufts of it stuck to the rafters and sheathing planks here and there.  But for the most part, it was gone.  So I didn't have to endure clouds of rock wool tumbling down on my head, as I'd anticipated.  True, I was encased in a hooded Tyvek coverall suit with attached booties, my face armored with an P100 anti-mold particle mask and goggles with no vents, but I hadn't fancied the prospect, all the same.

And I was wrong in thinking my roof is structured with 2x4 rafters.  No, they're 2x6s, or 1-5/8 x 5-3/4, to be exact.  The foam insulation guy was calculating on spraying on six inches, covering rafters and all, to get me to an R-value of 24, at least.  Not sure how this development will affect things.  Technically it could mean they could spray on eight inches or more, and maybe get me to the R-38 that's recommended for attics these day.  But that'd up the price beyond the just-barely-manageable figure I have from him now.

What else was I wrong about?  I was wrong in thinking that the black I was seeing on the back face of the kraft paper vapor barrior was mold.  Ha, silly me, that paper is black on the back side!  And, examining the insulation itself more closely, it's possible that the dark stuff I saw in the pink was only dirt, and not mold at all.  At least, it didn't look growy, just like dust.

Does that mean I was wrong about the whole project?  Not at all.  The batts were definitely damp that day in mid-September, and dirt is a classic place for mold to lodge in fiberglass insulation.  And with the facing paper hanging in tatters in so many places, the vapor barrier was grossly compromised.  I would rather not spend the money on this at this time, but it'll be money well-spent.

I was wrong in thinking the batts were held up solely by the lath battens that ran horizontally from rafter to rafter.  Yes, they gave some support, but mostly the pink stuff stayed put by means of staples-- lots of staples-- driven though the kraft paper wings into the rafters.  So I didn't have that stuff falling down on me, either.  Very glad to be wrong in this case.  And I was wrong in planning to roll up each batt in a piece of .5 mil plastic before I put it into the 55 gallon black bag.  I tried it once, on the first piece I took down, and the plastic got woefully out of control and simply would not stay put.  So I gave up on it and just rolled the batts in on themselves, taped them with cheap masking tape, and stuffed them in the bags.

Speaking of the bags, it's good that the insulation guy was wrong in predicting I'd end up with thirty bags of the stuff.  Nope.  Four bags of insulation and one of cardboard, small pieces of batten, and dirty dropcloths.

I've mentioned the cardboard.  It appears I was wrong in thinking that it was a pis aller employed by my POs-1 (who were, I believe, the ones who installed the pink insulation) to cover the gaps at the toe of the batts.  In the first place, the batts ran all the way down below the floor level, into the soffit space.  In the second place, it was abundantly evident that that cardboard dated from way, way before than my previous owners two back.  The cardboard lining the brick gable wall on the north end was clearly installed before the wood floor.   It was wedged between the floorboards and the brick and I had to cut it out with a utility knife. Whether it dates from the time the house was built in 1915 or so, or whether it was put in to protect the wall when the attic was finished later, I don't know.  I'm pretty sure that the room I use as my study wasn't original, as the 1916 tax assessment only lists three bedrooms.  But I saw at least one place where cardboard was used as shimming between structural members, so it's entirely possible that the house was built with a wholly-floored attic, with exposed rafters and the stairs leading up to it, and the knee walls and plaster came later.  I estimate that the room was done fairly early; pre-WWII, at least, since the trim matches what's downstairs (sans cornices) and the woodwork was originally shellacked, like the rest of the house.

Found something else curious, deeper in towards the front of the house:  There are three or four bays where the tongue-and-groove flooring doesn't go almost to the toe of the rafters, but there are wide planks of removable joinery notched in between the rafters instead.  I didn't lift any of them out the whole way, but when I shifted them I saw galvanized metal below.  Duct work?  A cold air return?  From where?  I think this would be over my dressing room, but the location is all wrong.  This really looks original.  What can it be?  Those planks will be immovable once the foam is in; will that matter?

In fact, speaking of the cardboard again, I found vestiges of heavy cardboard nailed to the underside of the rafters (which I found about impossible to remove, by the way), and I strongly suspect it was used to contain the rock wool that used to be in the roof.

On the back faces of some of this cardboard I saw evidence of water marking.  But it was dry now and I can only hope that that was from earlier leakage, like that which moved the POs-1 to remove the slate roof and put up fiberglass shingles.  (I found a piece of a slate at the eaves!).  There was also some water staining on the floor near the stub of the old kitchen chimney.  I don't say I won't give that a good scrubbing with borax, but it was dry, too.  In fact, the whole space was dry, and in some cases, too dry.  I didn't like the way pieces of wood would flake off some structural members when I was brushing them clean after the insulation was down.  I'm thinking a nice coat of spray foam will protect them, yes?

There were some things I was wrong about that I don't find so gratifying.  The Tyvek suit was a success, overall (pun!), and getting one that fit me by ordering online was the right way to go.  But I wish I'd gotten the gloves with the longer arms to them.  The 12" cuff kind I got you'd think would be long enough.  But the sleeves of my sweatshirt kept pushing them down, and they would creep out from under the elastic cuff of the suit.  I did pretty well at keeping fiberglass itchies off my skin-- except for that half inch of so at my wrists.

And despite my trying to order goggles in a "women's" size, they were still too big and conflicted with the particulate mask.  Great goggles, great mask, but my head simply isn't that big.  The two pieces of equipment got in each other's way and prevented me from having a proper seal on either.  The goggles quickly fogged up so I was working half blind, and the mask didn't sit tightly, so stuff still got up my nose and made it run.  Every three batts or so I'd have to take off the mask and blow my nose, it was so bad.  I'm still rather stopped up now.

But getting the headlamp was a fine idea; really, the only way to go, even though it barely perched on what was left of my forehead.  From the packaging I'd expected the batteries to last only five hours, but they kept going a lot longer, and are still good now.

I mentioned the 55-gallon bags.  My bright idea of throwing them out the north window once they were filled didn't turn out quite as planned.  The first one rolled off the back porch roof quite easily, but the next one landed square in the middle of the roof and stayed there. And my attempts to use the second and third to dislodge it only succeeded in creating a logjam.  So there I was, at maybe 11:00 o'clock at night, out on my porch roof trying to shove these big black trash bags down into the yard.  Still in the Tyvek suit, which wasn't the cleverest thing I've done all evening.  The booties on it give no traction whatever, so walking on the shingles was out of the question.  I had to lie on my side and kind of slither down till I could put a foot to the bags and send them over.  Of course they wouldn't go the with the first kick, and I had to creep lower and lower towards the eaves, hoping to gracious that any momentum I gave the bags wouldn't carry me over with them.  "Wrong" wouldn't've half described that!

They finally teetered on the edge of the gutter and rolled down, taking their sweet time about it.  Meanwhile, I saw that my thirteen-year-old calico cat had taken advantage of the open window from the guest bedroom to hop out onto the roof and do a little exploring of her own.  Happily, I had no compulsion to go lunging after her.  I slithered back up the way I came and called her to me once I was back on the sill.  She came, but changed her mind at the last moment and veered off.  Too bad, my girl! and I picked her up by the scruff of her neck and hauled her safely in. 

One last happy example of my being wrong:  It only took about three and a half hours to get the insulation down, rolled, bagged, and out the window.  It took the other three and a half hours to brush down the rafters and sheathing, remove stray pieces of rock wool, and clean up the floor.  One push-broom and three vacuum cleaners that took!  I think the hose of my shop vac is almost shot, which doesn't help.

Is the job done?  Well, almost.  I found there's rock wool in the soffit space, and I haven't removed it, since I'm not sure how that'll interface with the spray foam.  I want that area insulated, but somehow I don't see filling that whole space with the icynene.  I mean, won't that drive up the price, and what if I do get a chance to remove the aluminum exterior trim and the wood board underneath needs replaced?  On the other hand, does the foam have to run all the way to the gutter to prevent ice dams?  I may have to cut 1x boards and run the floor all the way to where the roof comes down.  Job for the portable circular saw, I expect.

I have the same question about the rock wool in the far southeast corner behind the lefthand closet.  There's a little triangle of space with insulation blown into it; will they foam that, or do I need to create a barrier to separate the two?

There should be no question about the old birds' nest materials in the northeast corner behind the old chimney.  It's got to go.  But somehow I didn't want to remove it out tonight.  Don't know why.  May have something to do with the kink in my shop vac house.  Maybe I want to see if there are any ornithological specimens in the mess.  But I'd rather deal with it in the daytime.

All cleaned up, barring the camera lens

Just sitting here typing this, I can feel that the room is colder than usual.  Even failing, that batt insulation did a reasonable job keeping the 3rd story warm.  Here's to the spray foam doing the job even better.

The Worst of It Is Past

The worst of the moldy attic insulation demolition is over.

At least, in my opinion.  I have heard it said that taking down batt insulation, moldy or otherwise, is a nasty job, and I may well end up glad to pay somebody else to do it.  But to someone who has sanded down the treads of two flights of stairs with all the concomitant dust, removing the insulation will be a project worth tackling.  Besides, there will be the reward of seeing the sheathing exposed and the old batts removed.

No, the worst part, which is done, is the prep work.  I hate prep work.  And so, the dropcloths are down in the study.  And the flattened packing boxes are out of the far end of the attic crawl space and piled onto the study detritus and boxes of books and Christmas decorations amassed in the guest bedroom.

In the process, I've discovered a lone knob-and-tube circuit at the farthest point of the knee wall.  I think it serves the outlet that, well, that this computer is plugged into.  The insulation appears to be good yet, but of course, it has no ground wire.  Not good for electronics.  But I won't get excited about it until I've had the current tester to it and have verified that it indeed is live, and where exactly it goes.

And nothing can be done about it (if anything does have to be done about it with any immediacy) before the bad insulation is removed.  And that will be done tomorrow, maybe, or at any rate the first day this coming week when I'm not called in to teach.