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December 28, 2006
To shellac or not to shellac?
We have a house that is being renovated and we are debating what to do with the woodwork. It has old shellac on it and some, but not much crazing (that spidery cracking), and is a bit blotchy in spots, dark, and dull. We like the dullness but aren't crazy about the blotchiness and the cracking. So we cleaned it off very, very well with denatured alcohol and dawn detergent. This didn't change things too much. Then we sanded it with very fine sandpaper in a test area, and it cleaned it up a bit, but took off too much of the original finish. Then we did a test run with a coat of shellac on both the sanded and not sanded sections. And still it doesn't look much different. The sanded section is too light and the other section just looks the same, but cleaner and shinier.
So the question is what next? Should we use a colored shellac? How many coats should we think about doing? Should we take off the old finish? This seems like it might be a waste of time because all the stuff we've read says that old shellac just literally melts in to the new shellac when you put it on. And we are just plain confused. Any idea where we go from here? Any idea where to get shellac that is colored in b'stone Brooklyn? Any idea whether you really can rub wax in to the finished surface of the shellac with steel wool and can tone down the crazy bright shine of the shellac finish? Thanks in advance for any information you can provide. Happy New Year!
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A friend of mine bought a Sears house upstate with similar woodwork issues. In addition, the woodwork was not masked when the walls were painted and so old wall paint had to be removed.
This is what we've found: Scraping the sloppy paint splotches is hard work. it mars the finish, (luckily it's on the edges of the frames, not the face). Chemical strippers take all finish off.
We stripped a door and window frame in the pantry, as a large-scale test. A more miserable job I can't imagine. We painted the door white. We should have primed it, but ended up putting many coats on till it looked white. We planned, (plan?) on staining and varnishing the window frame.
It looks like someone put a coat of something, in some sections, (shellac, laquer, polyurethane?), over the old finnish and it beaded up and dried. Some sections are perfect.
Any ideas of how to tell if wood is shellaced or laquered? I've been hesitant to try adding new finish over old till I knew what was originally applied.
I've wanted to try sanding some of these bumpy sections and refinishing. Did you sand down to bare wood? If you got down to the wood it would need stain or tinted varnish to match. How to get an exact match, I don't know.
I grew up with pained woodwork, and varnished woodwork looks abnormal to me. My solution would be to pick a nice colored paint and paint over it, but it's my friend's house and she says "no".
Posted by: Bill at December 28, 2006 11:58 PM
Anon--definitely don't remove the old shellac--it would be waste of time. I'm no expert, but the shellac you get at the hardware store is not a great product. You can get more subtlety and a thinner mix by mixing your own. There's a lot of choice online and also Garrett Wade in NYC; I've found the GW staff to be really helpful. I would think you would want several thin coats of shellac, which goes on pretty easily with a cloth. You can also dull it a bit with very fine steel wool and wax at the end if you like. Shellac IS a bit shiny, but it's so much warmer than poly or varnish; I don't think this is a bad
thing. Good luck!
Bill--Shellac will come off with denatured alcohol; poly or varnish will not. Try paint remover or Xylene for that.
Regarding painted vs stained wood--the real determinant for this is the species of the wood. I have all pine woodwork in my house and it was meant to be painted, even back in 1866 when my house was built; it doesn't have great color or grain, and the woodwork itself is pieced together. It was the less costly choice at the time.
If you have oak, mahogany, cherry or another finer species of wood, it was meant to be unpainted and finished with shellac and/or wax (or varnish or poly these days.)
I actually prefer my painted pine--it's lighter and brighter. But I might hesitate to paint over really high quality wood--to remove the paint in the future would be a nasty job, and might be a real turn-off for a future homeowner.
Posted by: tinarina at December 29, 2006 10:33 AM
to OP: you say you cleaned it very well with denatured alcohol, but it didn't change very much??If your existing finish is Shellac, the alcohol would have taken it all off, and the change would most likely be more dramatic.You may have varnish, instead, which would require a different approach.
Posted by: eews at December 29, 2006 10:58 AM
Sorry for my confusing first post. We used the denatured alcohol to test that the finish was shellac. It is because the alcohol turned it to mush. So we did the cleaning in another test area with Dawn detergent only. Thanks for everybody's posts. We really don't want to strip the finish. We did the sanding with a very fine grade of sandpaper only to try to get rid of what we thought was the top most layer of shellac or wax or whatever was making it look sort of murky. So now we really probably ought to use a better quality colored shellac. And it's I guess back to the testing of it all. Like most of our home reno projects they just never, ever seem to end!!!!!
Posted by: Anonymous at December 29, 2006 12:29 PM
"Tools for working wood" on 20th street is the new Garrett Wade in NYC. Also Abbott paint&varnish on 40th Street in Brooklyn will have what you are looking for.
Buffing with 0000 steel wool will smooth out and dull the finish. Yes- paste wax can be applied topicaly to the existing finish ( apply it with 0000 steel wool then buff with a soft cloth.) BTW- Shellac flakes come in super blond, blond, amber, dark amber, black , ect. (amber is most popular) Shellac should be cut with ahydroganious alchol (availiable everywhere shellac flakes are sold).
Posted by: southslope.woodworks at December 29, 2006 4:57 PM
We had shellac on all of our woodwork originally (some was painted later--having shellac on there underneath is a godsend--no paint in the pores!). I have finally washed all the shellac off all the exposed places it was, since it had darkened and crazed to the point of ugliness everywhere. It is a laborious process, but not difficult.
get denatured alcohol. Put it in a spray bottle. Spray a small area, then cover it with a piece of plastic tarp (tightly) for 10-15 minutes. Work on another area while you wait. Peel off the plastic, and wash with more spray and rags. Use an old card scraper (ask Garret Wade), a triangular paint scraper, and a razor-blade scraper to get the gook off. it takes about 45 minutes to do one stair spindle, and a lot faster on flat areas (like stair risers, baseboards). Not too bad on moldings, medium fast. Have good ventilation, but it's nowhere near as poisonous as stripper, or even paint. Shellac rules!
You really have to remove the old stuff if you want to get the crazing off. No choice. And you have to get it almost all off if you want the final color to be even. Yes, new shellac will bond to old, and you cna just clean the old with some alcohol and recoat, but it won't melt it completely--no time before it dries. So the crazing stays.
You can use different color shellac flakes to make the tone you want. We prefer garnet shellac (from Abbott Paint in Sunset Park). You mix it up yourself to a 2 pound cut. Easy as pie--but keep shaking it when you mix with alcohol. If it settles, it'll take days to melt completely. We apply with a fine-art varnish brush from an art store, a 1" wide brush.
Get yourself the best book on wood finishing: Understanding Wood Finishes by Bob Flexner. It's so excellent. You will learn everything you need.
Posted by: anonymous at January 3, 2007 3:03 PM
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