OTB's Fireplace Adventure Update 1/22-23/11
At the time of my last blog, this is what OTB's fireplace looked like.
This weekend we sanded the windows down to bare wood. My weapon of choice was the Black and Decker Mouse. Sadly the Mouse worked so hard that it must have had a heart attack and keeled over and died.
Luckily we had a backup Mouse from last summer’s dining room wainscoting refinishing project. The lesson we learned is that one should always have a spare Mouse when tackling a refinishing project if you live in a small town that does not have any of the big box stores such as Lowes, Home Depot, or Wal-Mart; otherwise, you’ll be making a trip to Grand Junction, CO which is 226 miles round trip. Joe knows this all too well after making an emergency run last summer to purchase Minwax WipeOn Polyurethane. The only hardware store (Moab has two mom and pop hardware stores) that carries this product had closed (in Moab stores like this close by 6:00), which didn’t matter anyway because I had purchased their last can of poly earlier in the week. After getting most of the wood sanded, any of the stubborn areas of wood that had been caulked during the previous owner’s renovation necessitated Joe scrubbing the wood with a brass wire brush and chemical stripper to get down to the bare wood. 
After the wood was cleaned, I pretreated the wood with Minwax Pre-Satin Wood Conditioner which prevents Douglas fir from absorbing too much stain and turning the grain almost black (It was part of the learning curve seven years ago on one of the windows during our Ogden bungalow Douglas fir restoration project). Finally, I stained the wood with Minwax Early American.
The combination of the Douglas fir's 95 year old patina and the Early American pigment creates the coloration similar to Stickley's Onondaga reddish-brown finish. 
That was it for that weekend. This is what OTB's fireplace looked like after this weekend.
It was time to load the truck and head back to Ogden.
This weekend we sanded the windows down to bare wood. My weapon of choice was the Black and Decker Mouse. Sadly the Mouse worked so hard that it must have had a heart attack and keeled over and died.
Luckily we had a backup Mouse from last summer’s dining room wainscoting refinishing project. The lesson we learned is that one should always have a spare Mouse when tackling a refinishing project if you live in a small town that does not have any of the big box stores such as Lowes, Home Depot, or Wal-Mart; otherwise, you’ll be making a trip to Grand Junction, CO which is 226 miles round trip. Joe knows this all too well after making an emergency run last summer to purchase Minwax WipeOn Polyurethane. The only hardware store (Moab has two mom and pop hardware stores) that carries this product had closed (in Moab stores like this close by 6:00), which didn’t matter anyway because I had purchased their last can of poly earlier in the week. After getting most of the wood sanded, any of the stubborn areas of wood that had been caulked during the previous owner’s renovation necessitated Joe scrubbing the wood with a brass wire brush and chemical stripper to get down to the bare wood. 
After the wood was cleaned, I pretreated the wood with Minwax Pre-Satin Wood Conditioner which prevents Douglas fir from absorbing too much stain and turning the grain almost black (It was part of the learning curve seven years ago on one of the windows during our Ogden bungalow Douglas fir restoration project). Finally, I stained the wood with Minwax Early American.
The combination of the Douglas fir's 95 year old patina and the Early American pigment creates the coloration similar to Stickley's Onondaga reddish-brown finish. 
That was it for that weekend. This is what OTB's fireplace looked like after this weekend.
It was time to load the truck and head back to Ogden.
Comments