The doors, after sanding to even out the finish, no shellac yet.
When we bought the Hatton House, there was a gorgeous door already in place, however it was painted on the exterior, but in a horrifying state of unfinished on the interior. Someone had stained the door with a single layer of stain, but they’d done in haphazardly, so that parts of the door had no stain at all, and parts of the door had stain pooled into corners and left to permanently damage the color of the wood. I stared at this door for two years, trying to sort out how I was going to attack it. I have tried to avoid using heavy duty strippers, and I couldn’t sand away the spots where stain had collected. I decided to try to finesse the coloring in the wood in combination with removing the dark spots where I could.
I started with a light sanding of 200 grit paper to take the dirt and hopefully even out some of the variation in color from the stain job. It didn’t take out all the color variation, especially in the window muntin corners, but it helped, and I hoped would be enough once I blended it with the shellac. Several people I’ve talked to use colorants in their shellac, but I opted for pure shellac and a stain coat from General Finishes Gel Stain in color Java.
This is what we were up against: stain on the face of the muntins, but not the sides, except where it pooled to almost black in the corners.
I coated the doors with a thin coat of shellac, followed by a coat of stain in areas that needed to be darkened. It was a bit tricky, feathering in the stain over the areas that got too dark in the previous owner’s coating. Each coat took about 90-120 minutes per door, as it took so much time to coat all the surfaces around the window panes without completely trashing the stained glass. Once I was happy that the color was as balanced as it could be, I alternated coats of shellac with extra fine steel wool until I’d built up a nice sheen. I think there were three cycles of shellac by the end of it.
The end result is pretty great. I love how the shellac pulls out the grain in the wood, and I think the variations in stain are to the point where they look like aging more than mistakes (that’s what I’ll tell myself at least). I used denatured alcohol to lift some of the wax from the trim around the door, and I’m pretty confident that with a little work in the spring, the trim can be brought to look just as great as the door does. Stay tuned….now that I’m getting more confident with wood working projects, it may be time to tear into the endless supply of those projects.
The finished product. Completed doors that look amazing (but don’t photograph well) in the daylight.
River Bend is full of people who are super smart about home renovation done properly. No one better exemplifies that than David Sweet of Bygone Era Consulting. I found out about him because he’s one of very few people who work on steam heat in Des Moines, and he’s about the only one with expertise in our single pipe system. He also restores antique gas and electric lighting, old plumbing, and does pre-purchase evaluations of older homes. But we became friends over woodwork.
The good news is the Hatton House came with it’s own architectural salvage in the attic: a huge pile of historic trim, bullseyes, plinth blocks and more. The bad news is that most of our salvage was in very rough shape. I started out pulling pieces that I could scrub down and clean up myself, but I quickly ran out of “quality” pieces and wasn’t too excited about stripping paint out of the detailed carving of the trim we needed to add three new doors as part of adding the first floor bathroom. Fortunately, I found Southpaw Furniture Refinishing in Valley Junction. For $1 per foot, Kevin will soak boards in a stripping bath that pulls most of the paint off even the boards that are paint on bare wood.
Hatton House Diaries 