Dining Room Woodwork, Before + After
We have been asked a lot of questions about the process used to refinish our Douglas fir woodwork and have finally wised up enough to write it down!
Paint Removal
We tried many different methods to strip paint off the woodwork, everything from off the shelf Home Depot chemical strippers to the Silent Paint Remover.
Although we really liked The Silent Paint Remover, it was too bulky to fit into small corners and I had difficulty using it on surfaces that weren’t flat. In the end, a chemical paint stripper called Master Strip, Formula A Remover sold in 5 gallon drums from the McBride company (Los Angeles, CA 818.507.8900) was the weapon of choice. Be sure to wear a respirator and to have good ventilation because this stuff is toxic.
The stripper was brushed on with a paint brush, allowed to sit until it started to work and scrapped off with a wide putty knife. This process is repeated until all the paint was removed.
Here is a trick to remove any paint residue left on the wood. Brush on the paint stripper and use steel wool to wipe it off. This will also help to sand down any of the wood grain that was raised by the chemical paint stripper.
It is difficult to remove paint from cracks or crevices. People with the patience of Saints use dental tools to go in and chip out all the particles of paint. That didn’t happen at our house. A good effort was made to remove all visible paint but the paint in cracks and crevices was dealt with after the wood was stained and I’ll explain the way that was handled once we get through the staining process.
Any cracks, holes or gouges in the wood were filled in with *gasp* Bondo Body Filler, which is normally used in car repair. Bondo has several things going for it. It’s cheaper and more pliable than wood fillers and putties. It is also a brown-red color that blends in well and is barely notable once the wood is stained.
Finally, lightly sand the wood with a handheld sander.
Wood That Was Originally Painted (instead of stained)
If the woodwork you are stripping was originally painted, the wood will need heavy sanding prior to staining.
Bleaching
To bleach or not to bleach…ah, that is the question.
This step is not necessary in many cases. It really depends on your situation and the type of look you are after.
The original finish on our woodwork was very dark, almost black. If our woodwork had never been touched and was in original pristine condition, I would have learned to live with the dark wood, although it’s not my taste. But our woodwork had been touched, many times. We decided to refinish the wood in a lighter tone more to our liking.
Perhaps because our woodwork was originally so dark the grain of the wood stood out and was considerably darker after stain was applied. We wanted a more uniform finish so a bleaching product was applied. This allowed the wood to accept the stain evenly.
Woodwork that has been bleached
A word of caution, be sure to tape off the edges of the floor with several layers of painter’s tape because the bleach will run off the baseboards and onto the floor. We found this out the hard way.
A furniture wood bleach product was used. It comes in a bag and you follow the directions on the bag regarding mixing the product and the amount of time to leave it on. You will need to wear a respirator, goggles to protect your eyes and gloves to protect your skin.
The bleach is brushed on and left per the manufacturer’s instructions. Bleach was left on our wood for a few hours. The bleach is washed off with water soaked rags and a bucket of water. You will need to change the water bucket often and to rinse the wood several times to be sure all the bleach is removed.
Let the wood dry overnight.
Wood That Was Originally Painted
The bleaching step was skipped for our upstairs woodwork which was originally painted. Bleach was not necessary to get an even stain coverage.
Staining
Select several stain colors that you think you will like and apply the colors to your woodwork. Apply a large enough portion so that you can get a clear idea of what the different stains will look like. It is also good to view the stains at different times of the day because the color will shift depending on the light. Another thing to keep in mind is that the stain will get slightly darker after varnish is applied.
Don’t be afraid to mix different stains together to achieve just the right color. Be sure to write your formula down, especially if you are planning on doing another room in the future. Another lesson learned the hard way.
We have used Watco brand Danish oils and also a mixture of several Minwax stains with great success. I don’t see any benefit of using one over the other.
Woodwork after a few applications of wood stain. Several more coats were applied to achieve the desired look.
Apply a light coat of stain with a soft, clean rag. Let it sit on the wood for a little bit, then very lightly wipe it off with a clean rag. A cotton tee shirt type of material works well. After that coat dries, keep adding coats and letting them dry until you achieve the desired color.
The dining room which was done earlier is actually a slightly different color than the rest of the wood in the house. Another thing to keep in mind is that the color will get a little darker after the varnish is applied.
Here are the 2 “recipes” that were used in our house:
Dining Room:
Watco Danish Oils - 3 parts Dark Walnut to 1 part Cherry
Living Room, Den and Back Porch woodwork:
Minwax Stains - 2 parts Special Walnut, 1.5 parts Cherry, .5 Red Oak
Just mix all the colors up in a big bucket.
Touch Up
Now is the time to touch up any tiny places and specs where the paint wasn’t removed. The stain will make these areas stand out so they will be easy to see. Mix some paint until it is the color of the stain. With a small brush carefully paint over all the little spots where the paint wasn’t removed. Allow to dry.
Varnish
The varnish was a mixture of 2 parts clear coat, one part semi gloss. This can be applied several ways. It can be lightly brushed on but you can end up with visible brush strokes. A better and faster way to get a smooth finish is to spray on the varnish using a paint sprayer.
Either approach will require 3 to 4 light coats of varnish. Allow the varnish to dry between coats.
After the final coat of varnish has dried overnight, lightly sand all the woodwork with a very fine grade of steel wool.
A lot of people have had good luck sealing their woodwork with shellac or Linseed oil instead of varnish.
Dining room woodwork after restoration
Order
It is best to strip off all the paint first. If you have layers of painted wallpaper covering your walls like we did, now is finished is a good time to remove it. If you wait to work on the walls after refinishing the wood, you risk damaging the finish on the woodwork.
After the wallpaper has been removed you can see if repair work is needed on your plaster walls. Once you have addressed your walls you can begin bleaching and/or staining your woodwork.
After the varnish has been applied and is dried, you can tape off the woodwork with painters tape and paint your ceiling and walls.
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February 9th, 2004 - 4:57 am
Heather,
This is one of the best descriptions of the overall paint removal process!
On my old house, a combination of heatgun for flat areas and chemical stripper for the smaller or more complex shapes was the ticket.
Your sequence of events matches what we discovered exactly.
Good luck and we’ll be watching.
February 9th, 2004 - 9:59 am
Fantastic! I agree with Bill…I have been boinking around the Internet looking for a description just like this…I am sure you have helped numerous people with your knowledge here. Again- wishing you all the best and keep up all your great effort…I can’t wait to see future improvements!
Dennis
February 9th, 2004 - 10:02 am
Hi Bill! We have been following your progress over at 118 Henry Street (http://www.118henrystreet.net). You guys have done so much work, it is really coming along. Thanks for your message.
Best,
heather + dave
February 9th, 2004 - 10:04 am
Thanks Dennis! It was your message that prompted me to finally write all this down. Best of luck with your own restoration project. Please keep in touch.
heather + dave
February 29th, 2004 - 7:46 am
Great job restoring the woodwork to a beautiful house! My wife and I moved into a just rehabbed foursqaure with some craftsman style woodwook on the first floor. The rehabbers stupidly splashed and smeared stain over the original varnish and then put on a coat of polyurethane. It could look a lot better with restoration work. Will the same removal techniques and chemical work for this as for your paint?
February 29th, 2004 - 12:55 pm
Hi Mike!
Thanks. Ugh! Since starting this site we have been emailed stories similar to yours. The chemical stripper Master Strip Formula A will take off polyurethane. We learned this fact the hard way when a little bit of stripper got on our floors around the base boards. My concern is that the chemical stripper will also damage the original stain used on your woodwork.
There may be a way to remove the poly and new stain without damaging the original finish (if that is something you want to keep). I recommend posting your question on American Bungalow’s online forum (http://www.ambungalow.com). Those folks are so knowledgeable about old houses and they have ran into just about every problem imaginable.
I wish you and your wife the best of luck and commend you on wanting to tackle the woodwork. It’s a big job!
Best,
heather
October 13th, 2004 - 4:58 pm
Great descriptions. We’ve been using CitriStrip for our fir trim and it works quite well, with less fumigation required. But we’ve only got latex paint to deal with, and I think that’s more pliable.
March 21st, 2005 - 3:46 pm
Your woodwork looks great! I have a 1915 bungalow very similar to yours and I’m in the process of refinishing all of the woodwork. I’ve had a difficult time coming up with a stain color I’m happy with and really like the color of your wood. What exact stain formula did you use?
March 29th, 2005 - 12:12 pm
I second Robert’s question! I’ve finally finished stripping and sanding my woodwork and would love to know what stain combination you used.
Thank you,
Ivee
December 28th, 2005 - 3:47 pm
You guys are fantastic!! We live in Brooklyn, NY, and are restoring an old brownstone. It needs about as much restoration as your place- your site is so encouraging.
I have kind of an unrelated question to this blog- We have shutters and the wood where the hinges screw into them is stripped. Do you have a trick for this, or know of a product that we can use?
Again, amazing site! Please keep posting! Thank you, Jess
May 11th, 2006 - 11:54 am
I am stripping 6-8 layers of paint off a door in my 1922 home. I am using the Silent Paint remover and am down to the orginal finish. However, there is some residue left and some bits of paint. I am not having any luck getting this stuff off. When I pull too hard with the scraper after heating I am removing the original finish (it’s lighter than the area around it). I have tried reheating and area that is pretty much clean except for the residue and have burned the wood, I have tried several products (Opps, mineral spirits, linseed oil, etc). I did find someone who used denatured alcohol - haven’t tried that yet. To get to my question, I was talking to someone who does restoration in CA, he thought that the door may have been originally treated with milk paint (I live in Virginia and he said this was commonly used during this time). He said that milk paint is hard to get off - I am stuck, I have spent a small fortune so far and am getting ready to head back to the hardware store. Any ideas or suggestions? I really want to keep the original finish but after ready everything I think I am going to have to stain again and apply a shellac or varnish.
May 11th, 2006 - 2:30 pm
Hi! We had that residue, too. Kind-of like a thin layer where you see wood in some areas and a thin layer of paint in others? We used denatured alcohol to get that off. We sponged denatured alcohol on and wiped an area clean, let it dry and went over it again (letting it dry in between) if necessary. If denatured alcohol doesn’t work you might consider trying a thin layer of chemical stripper.
I have seen milk paint in one house here and it looks completely different then what I described above. The paint is really thick and mostly solid. Chemical strippers make it like a thick mess - kind-of bubbles up and is really sticky- but doesn’t come off. You might be able to see wood in a few areas but you see mostly paint. From your description, it doesn’t sound like milk paint to me. On the off chance it is milk paint, a company called Behlen makes a special stripper to remove it. I have also heard that lye removes milk paint.
Using a tinted shellac could even out any variations in the finish and you might not need to restain. I’d so a test in a small area when you get to that step.
Something I am thinking of trying is renting a high powered, professional steamer and steaming paint off. I recently read an article about that. We are going to try it in our bathroom. The plaster walls have been painted numerous times and we want to get down to the plaster. The article I read (maybe it was in This Old House) talked about using the steamer to strip paint off wood as well.
Good luck! Don’t get discouraged.
June 7th, 2006 - 6:09 am
The milk paint you have may be “pickling” or “whitewash” and was made by dissolving shellac flakes in denatured alcohol.Sanding this material is futile and will take forever. It’s a very hard finish. I am restoring a 1950’s bungalo and all the fir trim was treated this way. After stripping all the layers of paint off I removed all the pickling by using alcohol on a rag. Using steel wool will get caught on the grain and can give you a life altering sliver if not careful. The best way is to rub cross grain. When all the pickling is removed sand with a hand held sander with the grain and never cross grain.
Hope this works out for you and good luck.
July 14th, 2006 - 1:05 pm
I just painted my sons bedroom a canary blue. I placed the blue tape on the baseboards, however some of the paint bled under the tape. How do I remove the paint without damaging the baseboards?
Sarah
July 26th, 2006 - 6:42 am
Great info here. Thank you all. Now my problem. We just bought an old house where the beams and rafters are stained dark dark brown in the room that will be our office. my husband washed them down but a lot of the stain ended up in the bucket. we let it dry and i just tried to paint over it (no i dont want the natural wood, just too dark in a room with small windows and these are not orig beams, possibly 20 yrs old.) but with the first stroke of white paint (undercoat) this latex paint just mixed with the brown stain and created a slightly lighter mess. no idea what the stain is though i am wondering if it isnt something like that wood stain you use to cover scratches on furniture–that never seems to dry. i also bought some oil based paint but havent tried it yet. does this stain need to be sealed in some way before painting..such as varnish first then oil based paint ..or latex? the house is very old but, as I mentioned, the beams are not.
thank you all, i may be tired but am inspired.
August 5th, 2006 - 1:30 am
I am in the middle of a master bedroom/bathroom remodel which was originally constructed in 1955 as bonus/rumpus room on the other side of the garage separate from the rest of the house. The bedroom has always had a douglas fir beam and wood ceiling. The bathroom ceiling was sheetrocked but once that was removed we exposed the same wood and beam ceiling as the bedroom, which I would like to keep as part of the remodel even though it has a very different look from the honed marble and coffee bean caesarstone countertop we are installing. My contractor, without researching the steps to correctly seal and stain this part of the ceiling applied a cherry stain to the beams which is way too red and won’t match the deeper browns of the other materials. He states he would rather not sand and strip this off but suggests he’ll apply a darker stain..something in the walnut family. I read the posting from a couple of years ago about the stripping and refinishing process but I’m not sure we have that kind of time since other subcontractors are due to start. But I do like the recipe that was of 3 parts dark walnut to 1 part cherry and I’m wondering if we can use this to apply over the first coat of cherry he applied. Since I don’t know much about woods and finishes I have no idea if this is a feasible solution or will it look terrible and are we digging ourselves in deeper. I am thinking it might be better to paint over the beams the same color we’ll be painting the walls and leave the natural wood slats of the ceiling (he hasn’t touched those yet and they are a light, warm natural wood color). I would rather keep the wood ceiling and beams in their lighter natural color but since he already made the beams much darker I’m not sure if there is any turning back. Any quick suggestions before we spend a boat load of $$ would be greatly appreciated.
August 8th, 2006 - 8:39 pm
Hi Andrea,
Sorry for the delayed response. We have been on vacation for the past week. You should be able to put a darker stain over the first stain as long as it hasn’t been sealed with a varnish, etc. You might need to adjust the recipe by adding a little more dark walnut because the cherry stain your contractor applied will probably sho through. I’d test a small area with just the dark walnut first. If that doesn’t look right, keep adding in a little bit of cherry until you get the right shade - doing tiny test patches of color and letting them dry as you go.
Good Luck!
heather
September 26th, 2006 - 8:57 am
Hello
Ive just started some test batches using JASCO paint remover and also CitriStrip. The Citristrip didnt cut 4 layers of paint, but the JASCO brand did fine.
Ive never heard of “Master Strip, Formula A Remover” before. Can you buy it at Lowes or someplace else? Did you feel this worked better than anything from Home Depot/Lowes? The JASCO I bought works pretty good. Thanks…. Dave
September 26th, 2006 - 12:19 pm
Hi Dave.
We used JASCO to strip our fireplace. That was before we found out about Master Strip. I think Master Strip is marketed more to contractors then to the general public. To my knowledge, it is not available at hardware /big box stores. I have seen it at a paint store frequented mainly by professional painters in down town LA.
I have to tell you that Master Strip rocks! We haven’t found anything better. That said, JASCO would be the product we would use if Master Strip was not available to us. If you have a lot of wood to strip it is more convenient to purchase the 5 gallon drums.
September 19th, 2007 - 3:01 pm
If it is possible to respond as soon as possible that would be great. we are doing our living room and dining room. we were wondering if after sanding and then polyurethane should we not walk, move or be in the house for defumication reasoning due to the polyurethane or are we free after a period of time? what would that time limit be if there is one?
Thank you for reading and helping us better our home
jenn r
September 19th, 2007 - 5:48 pm
Hi Jenn. I am not sure from your post if you are talking about refinished hardwood floors or trim and other woodwork? With our floors, we waited 24 hrs after the final coat of poly was applied to make sure it had thoroughly dried. We refinished our wood trim with varnish which did not smell that great. We let the house air out for a few hours but were in the house that night. I’m not an expert, but my general rule of thumb when working with chemicals or paints is that if I get a headache the chemicals are getting to me and I need to provide better ventilation or go outside (get out of the environment).
January 22nd, 2008 - 12:29 pm
Heather,
You two are our inspiration!!! Whenever we get depressed about our 1930 restoration, all we have to do is visit your website and your determination and hard work lifts our spirits!
We’ve been stripping and sanding the heart pine trim in our family room for the past several months, and started staining a test piece of baseboard just last night. The trouble is that, even with wood conditioner, we are running into blotchiness problems with the stain. I’ve consulted a local wood refinisher, and he suggested using a washcoat of sealer cut with thinner prior to staining, and also mentioned that residual chemical stripper may have soaked deep into the woodgrain and could be contributing to the problem. Did you have any problems like this when you were staining? I believe that douglas fir is a soft wood similar to pine. Thanks!!