I arrived back Tuesday night, and about all that got done that night was some e-mail reading (nowhere near all of them, though) and unpacking.
Wednesday started with a doctor appointment, followed by grocery shopping. Then I did some more e-mail reading, blog reading (there were over 5000 posts!!! ...although over 3000 of those were photo streams, which are fairly fast to skim through), dinner with family, and then Knit Night. I didn't get much knitting done, though... I got BABY TIME! Here's MathGirl with the baby, during one of the brief times I let go of the little sweetheart:
(No, it's not MathGirl's baby either.) Mmmm! Holding a baby, smelling that baby smell... heavenly!
Thursday and Friday I spent playing with this:
That's a solid oak desk that was painted grey, then faux finished to look like wood. Sort of:
Pretty nasty, huh?
Anyway, that tiger oak veneer you see on top was hidden under green linoleum. I think the top must have originally had glass... I'll have to get a piece. The linoleum glue is driving me around the bend! I used most of a 500 mL can of paint stripper on it, and there's *still* glue there! (The paint stripper mostly works much better on the paint, but I haven't done much stripping of paint because I'm now out of stripper.) I think the glue might be an animal hide glue, and so perhaps steam might be the right approach... hopefully that will work without damaging the veneer.
I was ready to call it quits this afternoon, and pretend that the desk was just fine in it's current half-stripped condition. (Do I really care that I've already spent around $75 on stripping and refinishing supplies?) However, after a liberal application of chocolate, a bath, and a DVD, I'm ready to go out and spend more money tomorrow, and continue my quest for a beautiful solid wood desk. (Sheesh, refinishing is expensive! And a lot of work!)
To buy: more paint stripper (to be used solely on the paint), mineral spirits and possibly denatured alcohol (whatever those two things are), oxalic acid (to remove the black stain on one corner), and whatever I need to reattach the veneer in the places where it's bubbling (probably some sort of glue and a syringe). Of course, I haven't figured out how I'm going to steam the hide glue off the veneer... whether I should buy something to do it, or see if I can rig up something with my electric kettle, or risk trying to use my iron. (I don't want to damage the iron... I want to be able to use it for clothing after.)
So yeah, I've been busy. It's late now, so I'm going to head to bed. Hopefully I'll get in a post or two tomorrow between loads of laundry, shopping, and that beast of a refinishing job. Oh, and visiting a friend in the evening.
2 comments:
Linoleum is usually stuck down with contact cement, which is best removed with lacquer thinner. It's very unlikely that it's hide glue.
Steaming the top will most certainly lift the veneer.
You'll probably want to get a proper respirator and some charcoal cartridges once you start getting into the fumey stuff. Such is the life of furniture stripping.
Thanks for the advice! (*sigh*... I was hoping to avoid buying the really expensive respirators...)
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