We finished one more thing on the list: the doors between Janeen’s office and the living room. After stripping all the paint off the doors, we carefully sanded the doors.
I then stained the doors with an oil based stain called ‘Old American’. It’s actually a lot more yellow than the photo below right shows. Below left you can see the door before it was stained.
We had some trouble at first figuring out how to strip the paint off the old brass door hardware. It’s much more delicate than the steel hinges, so we couldn’t attack it with a wire brush and heat gun. At first we tried using the heat gun, but the paint just wouldn’t come off completely. Chemical paint stripper and a toothbrush did the trick beautifully, though. And it didn’t damage the black oxide background to the patterns on the hand grips. They then polished up nicely with Brasso. Below right you can see how they looked on the door before.
After two coats of oil based color polyurethane (‘cherry’), the doors are done.
I reinstalled the brass hardware, and after a bit of adjustment, it all works quite nicely. The doors are not perfect, but I like the slight dents and imperfections: the doors are 100 years old, after all.
Janeen took the photo below. I think she was trying to decide if these are good work boots. The photo on the right shows the stain rags, air drying. Apparently if you bundle them up in a plastic garbage bag when wet, they can spontaneously catch fire. Not good in a wood house.
We ordered a fancy new desk for Janeen: It’s height can be adjusted electrically, to be a standing or sitting desk. I need to make a top for it, though. Until we get the office complete, the living room will be Janeen’s office.
Beautiful!