A Newel Post

Get it? A newel post? Ha. 

I will be honest.  The hall is not done, and I started a new project.  Why? Well, it turns out, trim installation is a lot harder than it looks. In the twenty minutes I attempted it on Friday night, I cracked two boards and a wall.  Ouch.  Lucky for me, Kevin is a much more patient person, he is more methodical, and he doesn't mind finishing my abandoned projects.  We tend to compliment each other well when working on the house. He is really our detail man, whereas I am the blunt force.  I am good at removal and power-tooling; he is good at finishing and picking paint out of cracks.  He is good at power-tooling too, but only after I've destroyed something enough that he is over the fear of wrecking it. Without me, projects would take months to get started.  Without him, they would never get finished.  


More on the trim, installations and decisions in another post.

Anyway, we need to get the trim installed today because the furnace is finally going in on Wednesday, and we can't have stuff everywhere in the basement.  So Kevin is installing the trim, while I begin the hall stairs. There are five stairs from the main floor, then a landing in which you make a 180 degree turn, then go up the rest of the way.  I am focusing on the stairs on the main floor, and leaving the top half until we are working upstairs again. Kevin and I are getting sick of feeling like we live in a crackhouse whenever we have guests, so main floor first. 


Here is a before shot, taken on the day we bought the house.  You can just barely see the carpet on the stairs...mmm minty green goodness.

Here is What we did to the stairs on the day we closed on the house:

Why is it that new homeowners always feel the need to rip out carpet the first day?  It's like a hazing ritual from the house. 

Anyway, here are the stairs about midway through the day yesterday. 

I took off the trim around the newel post and I am planning on trying stripper on it, as they are small pieces and I don't want to sand them too much.  Our stairs have this glossy yellowish finish from the 50's.  Here is a close-up.  

Anyone know what this is? You can see the grain through it, so it's not paint. We know it was put on circa 50's because the crappy built-ins in the dining room also date to the 50's and the finish is on them too.  It reminds me of a glaze.  


I would love to hear from you all: 


What was your first project after the keys of your house were handed to you?  

Step Four: Sanding

This is the fourth part of my series about stripping woodwork.  This is the step we really didn't want to do, but since the stain originally put on our wood work became blotchy when we took off the old shellac, we had no choice -- we had to sand.  It really did slow the process down.  Any regular readers might recall I was planning on doing the entire main floor this winter.  I am still in the hall I started in.  So it goes; we didn't really think I was going to have such high productivity did we?

Anyway, on to the sanding.  Any area that could be power sanded, got treatment from the random orbital.  While doing the outdoor project, we invested in a hose attachment and connectors so we could hook up the  shop-vac and the sander.  It really cuts down on the dust produced by the sander. We got the hose attachments at the Orange Store.

For sanding the trim, we went with four grits: 60, 100, 150, and 220. During the finishing phase we are using 400 to sand between coats.  Looking at the boards that are done, there are a few things I would have done differently.  I have a few of those curly scratches from the random orbital sander, and I think from now on, I will check the boards more carefully and hand-sand any of those out.  I will also work in a more well-lit area of the basement so I can see them better.

The trickiest part of sanding for me is when I am hand-sanding.  The boards that must be hand-sanded are the ones with the curves and detail.  It's hard to make sure I am keeping the profile crisp. I use a combination of hard sanding blocks and those soft foam sanding blocks that you see by the sanding paper at the store.  When I feel like the block itself is losing its grit, I just wrap new sandpaper on top.  I use the foam for any curves and the harder sanding block for corners and hard edges.

Once I was done sanding the boards I removed, I also began sanding the boards that remained installed.  These are the door frames. I found something kind of interesting when doing this.  The round doorway has a stop installed, like it used to have a door.  There are no ghosts of hinges, however, so I think the stop is just decoration.  Anyway, we thought removing the stop would make sanding a lot easier, so I began to pry it away.   The stops on our windows is mounted flush to the frame. On the round doorway, however, there is a channel cut into the frame. The joinery is so tight that the wood underneath hasn't even aged.

This picture above shows the straight piece of the stop removed, and the rounded still installed. I don't dare try to take it off the rounded area. I have a theory that the stop must have been installed before the frame was put in; all of the nails are sticking point side out.  Incidentally, it is a good thing there are no small children running around this house, because there has been at least 20 nails sticking straight out of the doorway for a week.

This picture gives you a good idea of what the wood looks like sanded down with 60 grit.  I make a point not to sand it down to make it look like perfect, new wood.  If there is a scratch, I don't sand it all out.  Although there is still some blotching I will sand out in future passes.

When working on the frames, I went to strip the paint on the kitchen doorway, and discovered it had always been painted.  I had mentioned what wood that was originally painted would look like when stripped. This is a good picture of it; see how underneath the paint it looks almost whitewashed?  It also shows the paint color we decided on for the hallway (the green on the left). I plan to strip this doorway and repaint it to match the kitchen woodwork.

And what has Kevin been up to while I have been working on the hall?

Making himself a woodworking bench.  It is his pride and joy; the top is individually laminated solid pine, when finished comes out to about 4 inches thick. The legs are also laminated together, all of it was hand-planed down smooth, and all of the mortises are hand-chiseled.  He really is a pretty talented guy.

And finally, a sneak preview of the finished boards. Next, I will report on the finishing and installation.