Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Replicating Moldings


My goal is to make this kitchen feel like it flows with the rest of the house.  One of my [b][i]major[/i][/b] projects will be replicating all of this old woodwork.  I am not a master craftsmen by any means, but it gives me an excuse to buy all sorts of new tools  :D
My question is what type of wood stock I should start with?  From what i can tell, most of the trim in the house is 120 year old pine.  Everything is painted right now, but we plan to strip it all eventually (even if it was originally meant to be painted, I think that the pine will look fine stained by today's standards).  The two staircases in the house are walnut...
With all this in mind, should I be trying to find antique reclaimed lumber to mill my trim from or should I just do the kitchen in new white oak, etc?

Picture of the door/window trim:




Tuesday, April 3, 2012

My New Toy - The Floor Sander

Hi All! Progress on the kitchen is still happening.  My father-in-law is starting work on the cabinets soon so Celia and I are trying to get some of the other stuff done.  We have now removed all of the ceramic tile and the 1/2 plywood subfloor.  Under that is more subfloor in the addition portion of the room and sheet vinyl over the original wood floors on the original portion.  I removed all of the sheet vinyl last week, so all that is remaining is the stubborn glue layer.  We have a gray colored glue/mastic (as opposed to the black mastic that many old house have).  We have yet to find a good way to remove it.  What we have tried so far:
Manual scraping, heat gun+scraping, wallpaper steamer, Goo-Gone type remover,  paint stripper, and Clean-Strip Adhesive/Mastic Remover.
Next up is the drum sander.   Yep, that's right!  I bought a drum sander today. I figure that I will be sanding floors for years to come so buying the equipment will be cheaper in the long run.