Saturday, January 21, 2006

Cleaning up the Posts and Beams

Before...







After...









I just finished sanding the posts and beams this morning. They were mostly unpainted, they had a lot of finish nails, and we covered in 1/4" plywood, and a homemade board and baton. I pulled probably a couple hundred finish nails out of the posts. I stripped the paint off as well as I could, the heat gun, or chemical stripper don't work that well on painted rough cut lumber though. I tried the hand plane on the rough cut lumber as well, that was a waste of time too, I guess 80 year old douglas fir is really tough stuff. So I used my belt sander in the end to do most of the smoothing out. I think I used at least 10 - 50 grit belts, 4 - 80 grit belts, and 4 - 120 grit belts. This afternoon I put a coat of Waterlox on them. I'm pretty happy with how they're coming out. The patina is kind of lost, since I had to sand so much, and they're a little blotchy. I think they'll even out though, once they've been exposed to light for a while. Two more coats of Waterlox to go, 6 hours minimum between coats, so it should be done by tomorrow. Then I can fix up some of the blemishes in the drywall, and we're ready to paint.

The name of our last post, A Tale of Two Bloggers, I think we inadvertantly stole it from Greg, since I read both of Greg's posts A Tale of Two Neighbours first, we didn't steal it intentionly... it just seemed to fit so well since, well, we're both from different cities.

2 comments:

Scott in Washington said...

Wow! Your beams are looking great.

Its amazing how many sander belts you can burn up in hurry isn't it?

Derek said...

Yeah, it cost more than I thought to sand the beams down, sanding belts aren't cheap. I lost some of the patina of the wood, there wasn't a choice though, since they were rough sawn. The seems to be getting a little darker over the last few days.