I was so thrilled about how nice the windows looked in the downstairs stairwell after I cleaned the paint stripper off them, I decided to do the same in my office today. Imagine my dismay when one particular pane did not clean up, and instead even got worse! I was completely baffled. It was as if the goo smeared all over it had mysteriously become hard as diamond when all the other panes cleaned up just as easy as that other window had. WTF??



Well, I showed this to my Spouse and he took one look at it and said, "it's not glass, it's Lucite". Ehhhhhhh? I tapped my finger on each pane and they sounded exactly the same. They even looked the same, in the middles anyway. I'd been looking at these windows for 2.5 solid years and never saw the one as different than the others. Then, to prove it, he took his keys out and tapped on each pane with the metal keys. The dirty one made a conspicuously dull "thud" compared to the other two. D'OH!!! You can't slip one past an engineer! LOL. It will remain like that for now, but ultimately I will have to replace that piece... preferably with a nice piece of glass.



Speaking of the stairwell I have the new door nearly completely stripped now. It matches the trim woodwork perfectly, as if it was always there! Oddly enough it has a powerful scent of pine unlike any of the other wood I stripped. I don't know if it's just a slightly different species, or if the wood is newer, or was preserved differently, or what. When the doors have all been shut up and you first walk in there, the alcoholy piney scent is about enough to knock ya out. Whew!

I am pleased to report further progress on scraping the paint on the trim in my office. The windows are definitely the most difficult part left and those are now 1/3 done:



It looks like about half-done in this picture, but in reality the inner parts take a lot more work than the wide outer parts. The inner part of the left window is about half-done and the right hand one has not been touched yet. Like the rest of the woodwork in this office, the windows have about 5 layers of old paint on them... purple-pink over paler pink over 3 shades of greenish brownish. The shelf underneath is unfinished pine, something I built long ago when I was still living in apartments and moving around all the time. I had been holding off on staining or painting it until I found out where I was going to live long-term. When I stain this office woodwork, this shelf will finally be stained to match! :)



Here's a closeup of the inner part being scraped. You can click on the picture if you really need the gory details. There are a lot of layers and crevices. I am not scraping the trough where the weight ropes are because my intention was to paint that a more saturated green color that goes with the walls and complements the golden brown that the woodwork will be. For this purpose I've selected a Dutch Boy G026 sample. 



Here is the sample shown with the wall green behind it, and my wood stain practice piece underneath. The practice piece, upon which I perfected how I was going to stain the woodwork to get the effect I wanted, has really come in handy for figuring stuff out color wise.



In other office news, I finished the 2nd closet door and put its hardware back on and remounted it for the time being. While it was off it "fell over" 2-3 times which I think may have been cat related. Oddly enough no cats were to be seen nearby after the loud crash of the it hitting the floor. But I still have my suspicions!

Got the rest of the one closet door frame stripped, as well as the lower half of that door and part of the baseboard on that wall:



The closets are only notionally finished. That will be a totally different project sometime in the far distant low priority future, so I did not strip the backside of the doorways, just the outside and the showing inner surfaces.



Here's the door mostly finished. All I have left is the sides, which shouldn't take long. Until they're done I'm not going to put the hardware back on or re-mount the door, so it's just sitting in the doorway for now:



Just for fun, click on the "project kaas office" tag (below, or in the list on left) to compare this to the previous photo where it was only half stripped.



Here's Zinger watching the proceedings. This is the dark version of this photo. It was either like this, or bright enough to see everything great indoors but without the artistic merits of the bright outdoors background. I am not good enough with this new camera yet to come close to getting what I want there.

I was really very virtuous and hardworking all day today, but probably the best thing I did was to strip a bunch more woodwork in my office. Here's a picture of a door I was working on:



It is Southern yellow Pine, which has a red heart. Apparently a lot of woodwork in Northern Wisconsin was made this way back when our house was built (1930). My intention is to stain the yellow parts with a maple stain that has a reddish element, then amber shellac the whole thing several times. I prototyped this on some test pieces of wood and it looks great, toning down the harlequin aspects of the two-colored pine while still totally revealing the wood's beauty. Drool!



I use Zip Strip for all my wood stripping stuff, as it seems way less evil than a lot of other paint strippers (you don't have to turn off the heat when you use it, for example) yet works great.

Today I finished the new ceiling light for my office upstairs. The base was an old stamped copper one I bought on eBay very cheaply, because someone had painted it over with a neutral tone ceiling paint. I was pleasantly surprised when it turned out to have good reusable electrical parts despite its age. Makes me wonder how much it might have been worth when it was new. I painted it, and another light base, gold back on the 5th.



The next step was to make some holes for the three chains that will hold up the bowl-shaped glass shade underneath the bulb. Back on the 5th I had pre-marked 3 dots equidistantly around the perimiter. This made it fairly brain-free to drill 2 holes at each location: one large enough to admit the balls making up the chain, and one too small to admit the balls but allowing in the "neck" between the balls. I got really lucky in that this particular fixture already had a pair of concentric troughs that allowed me to easily drill each pair of holes a precise distance away from each other. Small hole in outer trough, big hole in inner trough. The orientation is based on which direction the chains will be pulling with most force. Since this lamp is narrow and the shade is wide, I put the narrow side out so the chains will be pulled by gravity into their locked position.



To join the pairs of holes each into a single, keyhole-shaped hole I used a tiny diagonal cutters as a tin snips and nipped out the tiny bit of copper between each pair. The photo above shows a chain seated in one of the holes. It works absolutely perfectly! The holes are a little rough but they are where they'll never be seen, so I didn't worry about it too much. 



Now that the rough stuff was out of the way, it was time to paint it. I used green wall paint to match the office it's going into, and then another color of gold to bring out the highlights. This really is a nice elegant fixture, and the price was certainly right. I thought the painting part would be more nervewracking but maybe I am saving all my artistic disasters for the other fixture, the one going into the downstairs stairwell. LOL



Here's the shade I will be using with this light. It, too is a pale green. I really love these three chain hanging fixtures but it's hard to find the shade and fixture together. A local antiques shop owner told me this was because people dashing into old houses about to be demolished, just grab everything that looks cool. The dangling shade looks nice and sellable and the innocuous, beige painted tin light bulb holder above it is usually ignored. LOL!  Luckily there are still plenty of old light fixtures out there that were just for bare lightbulbs that can be converted. With some effort ones can be found that really complement the shades. I picked this one because the scrollwork and banding on it seemed to echo the fixture's design beautifully.



Here's the fixture mounted on the ceiling. This spot was previously occupied by a ceiling fan which my Spouse gleefully sold on eBay to make it go away. Preferably far, far away. After having removed all old hardware the ceiling basically had just plaster with 2 wires sticking out, no backbox or anything. It was still one of the less heinous examples of light wiring I've found in this house though. The wires (part of the knob and tube wiring part of this house still sports) are in good shape, and long enough to be worked with. The only really difficult part about mounting this was avoiding getting black handprints all over the nice white ceiling ;-)



Back when this fixture was made, a person would stick a light bulb in it and that would just be that. No shade. Of course, back when light bulbs were first invented people thought they were really cool and you were supposed to have them exposed so people could see them! This photo shows 2 of the chains dangling so they would be easy to find when I went up there to hang the bowl. Getting the thing on initially is kind of a pain. You have to push the small end of the chain up through a hole in the bowl while holding the bowl up with your other hand, then push it up through the keyhole slot in the fixture, and grab the end and pull the rest through with your third hand. What's that? You don't have three hands? Oh.. oh dear. I'm terribly sorry.



Here's what it looks like mounted. While it didn't take quite as long as the hand-painting part, the leveling-off of the fixture by fiddling with the chain lengths was by far the most tedious part of the project. I kept all the chains full length until it was finally perfect, then cut off all but a tail and placed the 3 tails in the convenient trough provided on the topside of the fixture's rim.



Tada! :)



That's all for now! [ waves ]