Floor is finished

After 3 days of crawling around on the floor and the fumes oh my the fumes. Here it is all finished. This is 3 coats of Waterlox, which I think came out very well. It was pretty easy to work with albeit on a bit on the expensive side, nearly twice the price of poly . I think If we use it again the low VOC version might be worth the additional 30 bucks. All things considered I would use it again.

I am very happy with the finished product. It's rustic but I think it works for a kitchen.

Progress Report

Lots of progress to report. Chris's parents came up last weekend and did helped us with some gardening, no pictures yet. I'm trying to get Chris to post about the gardening since I hid inside sanding the floor while everyone else worked on the garden. I decided not to rent a sander so I've been doing the whole thing with a random orbital sander. I was concerned that if we rented a sander we would take off too much of the wood and that it would end up just a bit too perfect. In this whole project one of my overall goals has been to make the kitchen look like it belongs to the house.

With this goal in mind I've been going back and forth about floor finishes for quite some time. Most of our rooms still have the original shellacked floors with their nice orangey color. I toyed with the idea of doing the same in the kitchen but decided against it because of durability concerns, a kitchen is going to see a lot of water and it is very possible that alcohol may be spilled which could put the finish at risk. So then I was leaning towards doing an alcohol based stain to get a similar shade and then finishing with a water based poly I had a lot of concerns about that as well we have a lot of different boards pieced in to the floor that are a lot of different ages and I just didn't know how the different woods were going to take the stain and at this point I just don't have the heart to strip it down again and re-sand. So in the end I decided on Waterlox I think it's going to give me some of the color that I desire and it should be easily reparable but still have the durability that the poly would have given me.

I did some test areas with it this afternoon and I think it's going to work out wonderfully. Here is the sample from the stove area. The stove area is probably one of the areas in the kitchen with the most cobbled together flooring I figure if it can look good there it should look good anywhere.

Waterlox has a 12-24 hour cure time and unfortunately for us the kitchen serves not only as a kitchen but also as hallway so the plan is that I will begin starting tomorrow night at 6:00 and then do one coat each night until I'm finished. Fortunately we still have the stairs on the back of our house that used to lead up to the upstairs apartment so we should be able to avoid the room in the evenings while the finish is curing. I hope to finish up by Wednesday so the floor will have a day and a half to cure before the plumber comes Friday.

We have a trim color

My Brown Mahogany TransTint Dye came on Thursday afternoon and Saturday afternoon I got a chance to try it out.

First I had to calculate the proper proportions of dye to shellac the bottle says 1 oz of dye to 1 quart of shellac. I scaled the recipe back to 1.56CCs of dye to 50CCs of shellac. For this step I used one of my measuring cups from Rockler and a syringe I bought from the farm section of my local Fleet Farm. I ordered some syringes and assorted measuring vessles from American Science and Surplus on Friday but alas they did not arrive on time.



Next I measured out the dye and shellac, I had to dump the dye out on a little plastic saucer in order to suck it up with the syringe the neck of the dye bottle was just a bit too small


After measuring out the proper proportions I mixed the dye into the shellac and then applied to my sample piece using a piece of an old t-shirt
I was so pleased with the way it came out I stripped my original test piece and refinished it with the shellac.

New (Here I'm comparing it with the trim that is yet to be stripped, I may darken this piece up a bit with another coat):

Old:By my calculations I should need two bottles of dye to slightly less than one gallon of shellac. I'm still thinking I should be able to do all the kitchen trim and doors with one gallon of shellac. Once I get the final mixed up I should be able to finish the door that has been sitting in my shop since January. Whoo hoo, Progress!

Trim Attempts 1 and 2

Well five cans of finish and we're no closer to picking a trim stain.

Here was Attempt #1
From Left to right we have Antique Walnut, Royal Walnut, and Olde Maple. None of them seemed quite what I was looking for but I did think perhaps by mixing the bombay mahogany and the antique walnut I might achieve just the color I was looking for.

So then we have Attempt #2

At this point I was thinking... maybe the Polyshades isn't the way to go maybe I'll try the pre-stain wood conditioner on the pine and try to finish it that way. So samples one and two are regular Minwax stains Red Oak and Red Mahogany. Although the pre-stain wood conditoner helped I still thought it came out blotchy. Samples 3 and 4 are different mixes of the bombay mahogany and antique walnut. Neither of them was really what I was looking for it just ends up being a bit too red to complement the floor.

So then I did what I should have done before I started this little project I googled "finishing pine" so now I'm working on attempt #3 where I use thinned shellac as a sealer and a gel stain instead of a liquid stain. Here's hoping third time is the charm.