What would you guess this is?
Happy restoration!
This site celebrates the craftsman home. It is about making a home and learning to live a craftsman way of life. Simplicity, handmade, community, local, artisan: these are a few of the topics you'll encounter when reading about our journey.
What would you guess this is?
Happy restoration!
It seemed that the interior wood finishing of our dining room would never get to final finishing stage. To recap, the woodwork of our 1914 craftsman home was under decades of paint. We started paint stripping in 2019 soon after purchasing the house. The situation went from bad to worse. Turns out that portions of the millwork had been sanded back to raw wood sometime in the 1950s (approx). There were several coats of lead based paint in direct contact with the wood, which makes it next to impossible to to remove the paint. Therefore, we resorted to sanding almost all of the millwork back to raw wood in the dining room.
Our goal is restore the millwork back to the early 1900s finishes. It is becoming harder and harder for the DIYer to find the products necessary to restore woodwork with the finishes that would've been used during that time period. Todays stains, gels and polyurethane finishes just don't reproduce the depth or richness found in historical finishes.
In comes Dalys. Dalys is a small scale finish manufacturer/producer located in the Pacific Northwest. It always helps to know a guy when you approach a project like this. Brian is our guy. During the summer of 2021 we sent a small piece of millwork to Brian at Dalys for finish matching. We also sent a sanded raw piece of matching millwork to him so that he could test his match. From there, he sent us the following finishing products:
Here, you see the following products: