STAIRWELL AND HALLWAY
Well... I feel like a broken record. The walls in the stairwell and hallway are also a mess. They're cracked, they have multiple patches and have a cottage cheese texture. So, first step is to skim coat the walls to make them smooth.
PAINT - WALLS
BENJAMIN MOORE
Boothbay Gray - Regal Flat Finish
This color is part of the Historic Color collection. Steeped in tradition, the refined, elegant colors of the Historical Collection deliver timeless color that can be used in traditional as well as contemporary spaces. Unveiled in 1976 to celebrate the US bicentennial, a collection of 191 colors inspired by America's historic landmarks.
I changed out the switches as well, removed the ugly sconce and after everything was smooth, I painted the walls. Throwing on the paint always reveals any scratches or areas that still need work
Next was replacing the ugly builder grade sconce. We chose this beautiful Balle Be Crystal Grand Sconce. Burnished brass that will patina over time and a shade made of K9 crystal really adds a statement as you walk in the front door.
The next step is to cleanup all of the wood work. The baseboards, stair risers and newel are scuffed and much of the stain has been rubbed away over the years. I'm convinced that they were never given a clear coat. If they did have polyurethane on them it has been rubbed free. You can see in the pics below what I mean.
There are a few options for making this look nice and 2 are out of the question. The first and most expensive is to remove and replace, which I'm not going to do right now. The second is to strip and sand down to the bare wood and then re-stain. This too is expensive, difficult and makes a mess.
What I chose to do is to create a variety of matching stains from an oil based stain and different parts mineral spirits. The more mineral spirits I add the lighter the stain is.
The first step is to clean everything really good with soapy water and then let it fully dry.
After running a lot of tests, I decided that Minwax Red Oak was the closest match. I brushed on the correct mix of stain and mineral spirits, let it sit for a couple minutes and then wiped the excess stain off with a rag.
You can see in the pic below the newel and the risers are finished, but the baseboard in the formal living room is not. you can really see the difference.
There are also some areas where the stain didn't adhere. My solution was acrylic paint. I know I want to use an acrylic topcoat instead of oil based and so this fix worked perfectly. There are areas with deep scratches and old paint in corners that is just too difficult to fix any other way.
I mixed a little raw umber and red oxide paint and then, with a tiny brush, painted the areas that needed fixed. Once it fully dried, I applied a topcoat of clear matte acrylic polyurethane.
In the above pic, the closet door has been given this same treatment and all of the stained wood has been finished.
You can easily see the changes in the before pic (Day 1) and the After pic.
Making my way through the upstairs hallway, I used Hickory gel stain on the closet door (Left) and the exterior of the Master Bedroom door (Right). The trim is the red oak mixture. These doors were already darker than the trim, so matching them to the trim could only work if I stripped them down to the bare wood. I like the difference in color of the trim to door, so I decided to just stain them.
The Master door jamb is the only one in the house that is painted white. I'm going to leave it for now. In phase 3 or 4 I will either strip the wood for stain or replace it so I can stain it.
The rest of the doors and trim in the hallway are pretty beat up as you can seen the photo below. I believe these were stained many years ago, but were never properly sealed with a clear coat.
The first thing to do was to clean them with soapy water. Once they were fully dried I brushed on Red Oak oil based stain at full strength. I let it sit for about 5 minutes and then wiped everything with a clean dry rag.
After the stain dried for 24 hours there were place that the stain didn't adhere to. With a small brush I used acrylic Red Oxide and Raw Siena and painted over the spots matching the paint as closely as I could to the stained area.
After that was fully dry I used an acrylic matte triple thick clear coat and sealed everything in. You can see the finished doors in the photos below.
Getting that new washer and dryer into that closet was a feat unto itself. I can tell you there was a lot of cursing that day.
