The Attic: One Room Challenge Week 6

This week is really about two things: realizing I'm not going to finish this overly-ambitious project in the next two weeks... and resetting the priorities.  

I didn't get nearly as much done as I had hoped upstairs.  Between balancing materials in a way that doesn't break our budget -or our storage space- and planning around the weather, I actually found that working in the dining room side of the stairs was the best plan for this week.  It also didn't help that we were planning around another great Halloween.  

But, even as this project really shifted into a side quest this week, there are a ton of other projects to check out over on the One Room Challenge.  Make sure to peek at all the Week 6 updates here!  

To catch up on the attic plan and see what we've been working on, check out these:
Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 

The Dining Room Side Quest

This week I barely worked upstairs at all!  We're really in our first big cold snap (so I probably should be a little more focused on it!). I worked more around the door into the dining room which will help air seal the attic from the rest of the house.  Getting the door in place meant a lot of work on the casing.  

Our dining room is a bit of a disaster... this summer when we changed the door to the kids' room, that really came from the plaster delaminating on the other side of the dining room.  An early arch retrofit had been poorly patched over several years, so we restored the casings along with adding colonnades between the living and dining rooms.  I found evidence there used to be plate rail, and now I'm working around kid-schedules to finish those repairs.  Since this is really the center of the house, it's a tricky spot to get work done.

While I built the door and added the jambs last week, I started planning the stain for the new door.  Luckily, we're changing the vent covers to ones that will be inset and harder for toddler-removal.  So, this summer I tested a lot of stain processes on the backs of them to find a recipe for matching the existing woodwork.  This week, I stained all four sides of the door, knowing that would be the trickiest part of staining this project.

The process I use is similar to what my grandpa taught me when I was a teenager.  Instead of mixing ratios of stains, I add different stains in layers based on what I need each stain to do.  Whenever I'm  matching new oak to old oak, I always start with Minwax penetrating stain in Special Walnut.  It deepens the definition in the grain in a way that is very typical in aged oak.  The next one I use is Minwax gel stain in Mahogany.  It brings out the deep red tones that match my woodwork very well.  Since it doesn't penetrate the grain as deeply, it also gives very consistent color no matter where I'm using it.  Then, as is consistent with the house, I did a topcoat in Zinsser Amber Shellac.  Shellac is the original finish on all my woodwork, so it stands that it should be used here too  (In other rooms, particularly with pine, I use it as a base coat.).

The last bit of work I did this week was to finish reinstalling the baseboards, base shoe, and base cap in the areas it was missing around the room, particularly between the buffet and the door casing.  While I coped the door casing to accommodate the original trim on the perpendicular wall, there was no way around needing to cut the original molding where I put a door through it.  I just keep reminding myself that form has to follow function.  I still plan to keep and reuse all the original trim that I have saved upstairs.  

Now, the real decisions are reorganizing what I can and should do in the next two weeks.  We are supposed to get a warm, dry few days this weekend, and I will install the window in the front gable.  Hopefully, I can build a storm window to accompany it as well.  Then insulating and building the kneewalls are the other top priority.  While I have hardware for the storage room ready to hang the new pocket door, that may have to wait until after the ORC timeline.  It happens!  We're still looking at a warmer winter either way.