aaaaand I'm still fussing with the door and window trim..

Well, the dining room walls are still lumpy. >_> Somehow after all this time I'm still stuck fussing with the trim and I haven't done the first thing to the walls. Here's hoping that a picture post will help snap me out of it!

I finally stripped the paint off the last dining room door casings, but unfortunately in addition to those requisite swirly scratches, I found one piece with a new sort of damage throughout that I can't sand out or repair. Basically, it looks like previous owners used it to chop firewood on:






The only solution I can think of (short of making new trim from scratch which I do not have the tools or $$ for) is that I'll have to flip all 3 of the boards over and try to finish the backs to look like the fronts. I don't know if the door is symmetrical enough for me to pull this off. *frets*

Another unexpected challenge I've had is getting the paint off the 1/4 inch reveals around the door and window frames. It has involved lots of thankless scraping and scrubbing with steel wool & alcohol above my head, and I can't imagine how the number of hours I've spent at it could possibly be worth it.

Here's a section where I've stripped the left half of the frame already, and the right half still has the white paint. (We're leaving the actual doors & windows white for now, since we can strip and refinish them at some later date without having the whole room dismantled). Dude, it looks like such an insubstantial amount of paint to remove!!! *shakes head in disbelief*




I think I'm finally nearing the end, though. I put 3 coats of garnet shellac on one of the windows, so it's looking a little better:


Today I got the first of a couple coats of polyurethane varnish on it as well, and I'm hoping to get the other windows to that point by sometime tomorrow.

(Then maybe I can tape up the windows and frames and get on to making a huge mess of the walls and ceiling!)

What are these swirly scratches?

Restoring the oak trim in the dining room is going slowly, but I'm almost done with all the baseboards and I'm starting on the window & door trim. The paint is coming off pretty well with the peel-away 7, but I'm finding a lot of really deep scratches in the wood underneath the paint:



What on earth caused these circular scratch marks??!! At first I thought maybe they were from someone accidentally bumping the baseboards with a sanding or cleaning machine they were using on the floor, but now I'm finding the same marks on the trim above the doors!!!















Was someone purposely scratching up the woodwork to help adhere the paint or something??!! Has anyone else encountered something like this?? (*boggles*)

Anyway, because the original finish is all so damaged, I'm refinishing the trim the hard way. After I get the paint out of the gouges, I'm removing the original finish with alcohol, sanding down the boards and finishing the wood with garnet dewaxed shellac. I'm very pleased with the results, and I can't wait to someday get the trim back up. :)

(Thanks to Gary and Aaron & Jeannie for all the info about shellac-- I am in LOVE with the stuff, and now I'm considering a few coats of it on the floors, as well).