Stripping…as in Wood
The weather was gorgeous this weekend in Wisconsin. I read on the porch, went to the farmer’s market, made fried green tomatoes, pulled weeds from my “garden” and, although I did not run around the yard naked, I did strip in the garage…meaning I removed 80-year-old shellac from the wood trim that goes in second floor.
Here are my stripping tools. Some might be surprised that there’s no pole or stilettos.
I picked up a can of wood stripper that could deal with shellac, grabbed the heavy-duty gloves we used when we applied muriatic acid to the basement walls, some steel wool to rub the stripper onto the wood and paper towels to wipe it off the wood. And my precious Cafe du Monde coffee tin from New Orleans (which became less precious when I realized I could buy more Cafe du Monde chicory coffee at stores in Milwaukee) was filled with stripper and covered in shellac residue by the end of the day.
Here’s what was left to finish (the trim has been keeping our Kohler Devonshire bathtub company until we’re ready to install it in what was The Ugly Bathroom).
And here it is all finished, three hours later.
Now, I’m hoping for some help. The previous homeowner had already stripped a third of the wood and I just finished the rest. But here’s the dilemma, how do I know if the previous owner (who is deceased) applied a stain, a wax or nothing? Here’s a side by side comparison of the old homeowner’s stripped wood (left) and my stripped wood (right). 
The wood on the left just looks a little warmer and shinier to me. Any ideas?
It looks like it reads “Datail K.” I have no idea what it means. Sounds kinda like ‘dovetail’ or ‘detail.’ I wish it would’ve read “There is gold buried under the basement floor,” but no such luck.
Oooh – maybe I should leave a little note of my own on the back of one – like “Paint this and die!”
That would have been made the whole project worth it…a big bag of gold…how symbolic.