It's time to work on the buffet and I have a question

[Neighmond]

My trouble was that when I jacked the house the damn thing never wanted to go straight up-it wanted to spread out and go every which way. I would make sure the support under the sideboard is sound and reset the doors if it were mine. I do agree that you will have a much prettier piece when you are done refinishing it, I saw how pretty the rest turned out!

As it's worth

Chaz

[nlswitz]

My trouble was that when I jacked the house the damn thing never wanted to go straight up-it wanted to spread out and go every which way. I would make sure the support under the sideboard is sound and reset the doors if it were mine. I do agree that you will have a much prettier piece when you are done refinishing it, I saw how pretty the rest turned out!

As it's worth

Chaz

I'm thinking to just have the doors adjusted. Thanks for your nice comments on my work.

[nlswitz]

The good news is that one of my neighbors is a finish carpenter and he is going to re-fit all the doors... For a fee of course! Yeah!

[wletson]

The good news is that one of my neighbors is a finish carpenter and he is going to re-fit all the doors... For a fee of course! Yeah!

Good deal! Get him something nice for Christmas or something.

[nlswitz]

The good news is that one of my neighbors is a finish carpenter and he is going to re-fit all the doors... For a fee of course! Yeah!

Good deal! Get him something nice for Christmas or something.

My husband gave me permission to have him buy, mill, and install all my missing trim. It's Christmas in November for me!

[Don M]

The good news is that one of my neighbors is a finish carpenter and he is going to re-fit all the doors... For a fee of course! Yeah!

Good deal! Get him something nice for Christmas or something.

My husband gave me permission to have him buy, mill, and install all my missing trim. It's Christmas in November for me!

Woopee!!

[phil]

douglas fir darkens with age, I think the shadow around the latch is just because the latch hid it from the light all these years. a difference like that is to be expected under the old hardware on fir. If you go sanding you will get down into light wood. If it were me I would keep the finish and just clean it with fine steel wool/ danish oil/ turpentine and vinegar. go lightly and use the fine steel wool wet with the solution and after you are tired of rubbing , wipe it all down really well with some old Tee shirts. then have your neighbor refit the doors. I would not concern myself with it being perfectly level just make the doors work right, fix up any missing trim and see if that makes you happy. stripping and refinishing is possible but it has nice patina now and unless you don't like it after doing the above I wouldn't open that can of worms.

you seemed to say with confidence that it had a stain on it , maybe it does, it could also be that the finish itself had darkened with age or that they did a clear finish with a tint. (a toner) If some parts are lighter you could darken them to match. (perhaps Mohawk spray can lacquer) If you start sanding you will really need to send everything , every crack and crevasse to get right down to the light wood and then start rebuilding the finish. I think you will have success in rubbing out the sheen. the fine steel wool will do that. you can also use a potato sack with some pumice to adjust the sheen. that should be the easy part.

went back and re-read , I see you have stripped the casings right down and refinished, what are you refinishing with? that wood will darken but it takes a long time. I have been doing similar but I finish with danish oil and if I have sanded right into the wood like that I will put a bit of stain into the danish oil after I have done a couple of coats. if it is shellac or laquer you could also do more coats with a tint.

If you take an antique and wash the finish off, say you use lacquer thinners or paint stripper and white rags. That old finish will never be clear in color. When you refinish an antique, the end result is usually in a restoration perspective, in other words the objective is not to make it look new but to make it look old and well cared for. with that in mind if I refinish something , the end result I have in mind is what the wood would look like if it was in grandma's dining room where she looked after it, which would be a bit darker than your trim.
when I start finishing, I never put toners or tints in until I get one or two coats down. this is because if there are cracks and imperfections in the raw wood, I dont' want the dark pigments to soak into those imperfections and enhance them, so I do a couple of coats of clear first, then slowly tone the wood to the hue and darkness I wish to achieve. I think what you have done with the trim looks great and after you do what you will with the hutch you can still darken anything you want just do it slowly as it is easy to go darker but impossible to go lighter again and more coats makes it more even.

also by using tints in danish oil or linseed oil or tung oil , you are putting the finish down int to the wood and not hiding the grain. If you put tints into clear finishes like shellac , Lacquer or poly that is like a darkened coating over your wood and has more tendency to hide the grain.

many 1930's era mass production furniture pieces use heavy toners because walnut started to get expensive and so to replicate the old english antiques, they used woods like pine and made them look like walnut with toners and tints, and also they used a lot of walnut veneers.. Older high end furniture used more solid walnut and trees that were first sought after and later in a more depleted supply.. I see this technique in a lot of depression era furniture. we had lots of great old cabinetmakers and labor was cheap so they saved where they could by using toners and veneers a lot.

[nlswitz]

Hi Phil,
Thanks for all that helpful information. I'm 100% confident that the stain and finish on the buffet and the wood elsewhere is not original. The stain was a Cabernet color...we know this because there was some in the garage and runs of it on the wall (under the first couple layers of wallpaper). Maybe if I'd found wavyglass before starting on this project I may have tried to do it differently, but as it stands I've already stripped, stained and finished all the wood in the inglenook and living room. The dining room is the last room and I'm almost done here (the buffet being the last part).
Also, the wood in the windows on the south side of the house was in very bad shape... Probably if I had started with the windows I would have given up quickly! But I'm proud to say the windows in the living room (inside) now look great and are better protected from the sun. And the dining room windows work again. I had tried to hire 4 different people to fix these (intentionally disabled in the past). The first person restores windows but said we live too far away to make the job worthwhile. The second two were from local window companies who said that repair was not possible. The 4th has a restoration company and has been advising me throughout the project (he's also the head of the Cultural Heritage Board). He told me that I'm capable of doing it myself. I didn't believe him, but he wouldn't give me a price for the work so I had to do it. And I was successful!

This is all to say that the buffet is just one part of a very big project. I really need to go through the same process or else it would look pretty strange.

Meanwhile, all of the missing battens, plate rail, and crown molding were milled and installed. The next challenge will be string them to the existing wood color before the staining and finishing all the wood. All of this wood needed to be replaced because a previous owner removed it to put up paneling.

[Don M]

Wow, all that new wood work looks super!

[phil]

I have been stripping and or replacing a lot of the fir trim in my house because some nut painted it all white at some point. baseboards in the attic never existed so I bought nice edge grain grade A fir for those, but it is 3/4 not one inch. hard to get one inch I thought. Some of the other baseboards were missing and I bought reclaimed and had to strip them. I still have lots to do as well. windows and trim in the living room. Sometimes I think it is actually so much easier to just buy new wood and mill it to size rather than stripping, the end result isn't much different. Now I am doing my outside front stairs from some full 2 inch rough sawn lumber. It took many hours to joint, trim, surface pane, sand, do the roundover, it is coming but it is certainly a lot of work. labor of love but I couldn't afford to buy what I can do on my own if I discipline myself to keep going without neglecting the fun stuff I want to do and it is a balance. In seeing the work you have done I can appreciate the amount of work it is and can admire how good it is looking as well. You can always make some of it darker to match , the staining is the easy part. I love the craftsman detail of those pillars. No matter how much work it is , the time is soon forgotten but the results are there forever as long as some nut with a paintbrush doesn't own it next

I learned some tricks for stripping it faster, that helped. I always end up wondering about how much of that heated paint I want to breathe in. I think I like eating sawdust more. a lot of the trim is full 1 inch or full 2 inch and I have learned that in buying this rough sawn lumber I can get very close to full dimension. also looking back at those 3/4 baseboards and wishing they were one inch. I have since gotten better at woodwork and don't find it too hard to glue strips on to make stuff look thicker, so things like gluing a 1/4 inch strip along the edges of a 3/4 plank to make it appear to be 1 inch are a good shortcut. I even made some casings that are actually only 1/4 thick but with a good job on the edges appear to be 1 1/4. I was able to then use a board I really liked to make 3 or 4 casings which are actually hollow. stuff like that saves a lot in lumber costs.