In every project there is always that “Oh, crap!” moment. Our “Crappity, crap, crap” moment is almost unbelievable. The stain color has faded, wait for it…AFTER the wood has been sealed with varnish. Several coats of varnish. It gets even better…A FEW WEEKS after the wood had been stained and sealed. “Oh, crap!” indeed.

We are just scratching our heads (it’s better then beating our heads against the wall) wondering how this happened? It wasn’t a slow, gradual fade. One day the stain color was dark and rich, the next day it wasn’t. We went to bed to dark woodwork and a project that was almost completed. The next morning we awoke to woodwork that looks faded out and a project that refuses to end. What cruel joke is this?

The only thing we can think of is that the wood has absorbed the stain…? Because the wood was dry? Because the wood was originally painted? Because we didn’t condition the wood prior to staining? Because someone in this house has really bad karma? All of the above?

Now, what to do about it?

1) Tried putting a little stain over the varnish, knowing that wouldn’t work, but hoping against hope it would. It didn’t.

2) Know that the “right thing” to do is to sand off the layers of varnish from all the woodwork and restain. I think about the amount of time and mess this would cause, after the amount of mess and work it took to even get to this point, and decide stabbing myself in the eye with a fork seems more appealing.

3) We are going to try to tint the varnish with a little stain color and have Pablo spray it on the woodwork.

The brick on our fireplace was faded out from the paint stripping process and we weren’t sure how to darken it. I posted the question to the knowledgeable folks over at American Bungalow magazine’s online forum.

Fireplace before

Someone had stained their brick with wood stain to bring back the color. Another poster suggested trying concrete stain. One poster who has orange bricks like ours used a mixture of 50% boiled linseed oil and 50% mineral spirits to bring back the color to his bricks. We decided to try this approach first.

I tested a brick on the side of the fireplace near the bottom. If it didn’t work, this area wouldn’t be all that visible. But, it did work. You can see the difference between the faded brick and the brick treated with boiled linseed oil and mineral spirits.

Applying boiled linseed oil and mineral spirits mixture

I applied it with a small cotton rag and we let it sit on the brick for about 5 minutes. David followed behind me with a clean cotton rag and wiped any excess off.

The grout really stood out so we went back in and covered the grout as well. It darkened it only slightly but created a more uniform look.

Fireplace after

We were recently at a restaurant and I fell in love with this wall! I love the color, texture and large faded text.

The vintage industrial lights are perfect with the wall.

I can’t quite see this look in my bungalow…but the wall color and industrial lights are amazing.

Paint color creates the mood and makes a huge impact in any room. I am looking for something that feels peaceful and soothing for our bedroom, which led me to search for a soft, faded grayish-pinky-tuape color.

After deciding to go in this direction, I found the above photo of a room designed by renowned decorator Windsor Smith. This was enough to convince me that I am going in the right direction. Hey, if it is good enough for Windsor…

I have decided to go with the paint color on the far left, a very pretty color from Dunn Edwards called Chocolate Milk (DE6059) with a soft blue-gray color on the ceiling.

It has finally sunk in that we don’t have the stamina to have house projects going all the time, one after another, lets hurry up and get everything done so our house is restored all ready. Our what seemed realistic at the time plan, the one where we complete all the work on our house within five years? It’s now the 10 year plan or the hopefully we get the house done before we die plan. Considering this is our fourth year in the house and we are barely halfway done, I think the new plan is a good call.

We have decided that completing one project a year is a more realistic pace for us. Although, it would have been nice to have restored the kitchen and our main bathroom before we hit upon the one-project-a-year-for-a-more-balanced-life approach. I think it is going to be a while before I have the ever changing kitchen of my dreams.

January
My dad came to visit and finished some plumbing work he had started the year before. This culminated with hooking up the sink in our downstairs half bath. It only took us 3 years to actually have water running out of a faucet in one of our bathrooms. Yeah!

February

The episode of “Restoration Realities” featuring us aired on the DIY television network. Along with the show’s host and carpenter we built a period appropriate screen door and weather stripped our windows and front door.

Heather + Dave on Restoration Realities Part 1
Restoration Realities Part 2
Restoration Realities Part 3
Restoration Realities Part 4

March
Did absolutely NO work on the house.

April
Did absolutely NO work on the house, but may have scared a very nice sounding family away from the idea of restoring a rundown Craftsman home of their own.

May
Did absolutely NO work on the house. Starting to see a theme here?

June
Did absolutely NO work on the house.

July
Did absolutely NO work on the house, but I finally resolved the ownership issue of the oil and mineral rights to our property.

August
Finally, some work on the house! Stripped the woodwork and doors of the stairwell, landing and upstairs back hallway. I purchased leaded glass French doors from the early 1900′s off of eBay for the upstairs back hallway.

September
I publicly confess that I have resentful feelings towards the house for the first time. I think I used the word “hate.” And, in certain moments I do hate the house. There, I said it again. We are at an odd point in our restoration experience. The honeymoon period with the house is definitely over.

Maybe this is normal? Maybe around year 4 of an extensive restoration project everyone starts hating their house a little bit, or at least all the time, money and energy that goes into it? After all the work on our house year, after year, after year, we are barely at the halfway point of having our home fully restored.

It’s not like I hate the house all the time. It comes and goes. There are moments when I also love our house. Most of those loving moments are spent in the completed portion of the house.

October
We discovered that the upstairs sleeping porch, a 1918 addition, was inadequately framed. I’m not sure if inadequate is a strong enough word to describe opening up a wall and discovering two 2×2′s as the sole support for a load bearing wall. Shocking comes to mind, so does what the hell were they thinking, quickly followed by I wonder how poorly the rest of the sleeping porch is built?

Pablo rebuilt the wall and installed the leaded glass French doors.

November
Ah, November…November was a month chock full of resentful, or maybe even hateful feelings. There was a lot to hate.

Getting right to it, we both hated the color I selected to paint the stairwell and hallway. I was going for silvery sage but ended up with baby nursery mint green. We received alot of wonderful paint color suggestions, but in the end decided to go with a blue green color that matches the original 1912 wall color of our bedroom.

This leads us to the most mysterious occurrence that has happened during our entire restoration process. Two weeks after the woodwork was stained and sealed with several coats of varnish the woodwork faded. Drastically. Overnight. We have no idea how or why this happened. It’s so unbelievable. I didn’t even know that such a thing was possible? We are hoping that someone out there might be able to provide an answer.

December
Our stairwell and back hallway project is completed. One more down, seven major projects left to go…

Lulu and Winston underneath the Christmas tree

David and I spent a quiet Christmas in our little bungalow, just the two of us.

Looking forward to 2007!

The faded woodwork debacle left us feeling discouraged. If it had been a bedroom insead of a hallway that we pass through several times a day, we might have just shut the door on the room and our project for a few months.

Pablo mixed stain into varnish and sprayed that on our woodwork with a paint sprayer. No one was sure if this idea was even going to work or how well it would turn out. It took several tries to get the color right, but the end result looked much better then we had hoped for.

The downside was that the varnish tinted more then our woodwork. Right now we have a pink bathtub, toilet, sink, fishtank, computer desk, computer monitor, mirrors and anything else we forgot to cover. It should have occured to one of us to cover these things in plastic before we turned on the paint sprayer.

Good thing we already needed to repaint the hallway.

The front entry seems so much more inviting now.

The plaster wall has been repaired, the wood stripped and stained, and the walls painted.

Looking into the den before.

Looking into the den now.

Built-in book shelf and the gentleman caller’s bench.

David stripping the paint of our fireplace and fireplace today.

:: See how we brought back our fireplace’s luster after the bricks faded during the paint stripping process. ::

Stripping away layers of paint.

Lulu in the finished living room.

See Living Room Resources to learn about the products used in our restoration.

When we were selecting the wall color for the dining room last spring, we went through 6 different colors starting with burnt red and ending with a golden yellow. This time we were able to choose a wall color in two tries. We are certainly improving. Actually, there is not much of a “we”, David usually goes along with whatever color I select. Then he loves the color even when it’s blatantly wrong.

Opps! Looks like we missed a spot or two.

My first choice was a soft gold color by Sherwin Williams that looked too green next to our dining room walls. We ended up going with Wilmington Tan from Benjamin Moore’s historical collection. It is a shade darker than the Shelburne Buff from the same collection that we used on the dining room walls. The ceiling is painted Compatible Cream from Sherwin Williams.

The new vent cover from Rejuvenation is installed.

We are almost done with the living room. There is some touch up work that needs to be done with paint and stain. Our brick fireplace got a little faded from the paint stripper so we are looking into staining it. There is some hardware to install in the room and we need to hang the antique light fixture once it arrives. I’ll post more photos once we get all the final pieces installed in the room.

A backward glance, our living room before restoration and the worst days during the restoration.

Now we are starting work on the den!