This is amazing, I have actually managed to impress myself! Last year I stained and urethaned two doors. I thought that they looked good and was happy with the result. Here are some pictures. If you click on them you can see a larger image.
These are brand new pine doors from Home Depot. Well, yesterday I stained two more doors. Again brand new from Home Depot using the same "Golden Oak" stain BUT this time I put on three coats of Zinsser "Bullseye" amber shellac and NO polyurethane. Besides the fact that I had both doors finished and hung in the same day (because the shellac dries in 45 minutes), they look like they have been in this house for 100 years! Look at these pictures
WOW! I know that I keep pimping this stuff but, if you need to replace a door with a new one and want it to look like it has always been there, then shellac is the way to go! I know of two doors that are going to get the shellac treatment sometime soon! Amazing, simply amazing....
Amber Shellac is all I use. I even use it on floors. Looks kick ass on pine. Zinsser now makes a product that can allow you to put polyurethane on top of the Amber Shellac. It's called Seal Coat and it contains no wax. I highly recommend it! I normaly don't sing the praises of polyurethane, but with two dogs and two kids it's a no-brainer. It still has that Amber look. For some strange reason, I even like the smell.
ReplyDeleteGreat Job-
Jim
I did a door with Waterlox, it's a varnish that is based on an old formula. I'll have to do a comparison to shellac on some scraps. I plan to do the floors with it eventually. I may shellac the floors in the interim, since the wood is bare in a couple places, and I know I won't get around to sanding them until next summer. Have you tried mixing shellac with flakes? I haven't but before the Zinnser, I think it was the only way.
ReplyDeleteThat is really amazing. Now if only we had used that one the 2 oak doors we already refinished. Or all our woodwork for that matter. We used stain and haven't coated it w/ anything yet. Don't want poly because it isn't repairable.
ReplyDeletePoly looks like a plastic film compared to the shellac but I did use two coats of thinned poly on some of the shellac coated floors to reduce scratching and water stains. After they were waxed you couldn't tell there is poly on them. I have used the shellac flakes and the seed lac from Shellac.net but noticed that the subtle color differences would not be noticable with the scope of the area being covered and the Zinsser was more readily avaliable and didn't have to be filtered which is quite time consuming when you are using as much of the stuff as I have had to use. Shellac will cover painted surfaces quite well and in the case of my two doors will be applied over the poly finish with a similar result to the two shellac coated doors. I have also used it over metal door hardware and to refurbish a slate mantle once I realized that it was colored with a burgundy tinted shellac. I am quite an expert with the stuff now but I never expected my new pine doors to come out as good as they did!
ReplyDeletethe wonders of shellac! We have the flakes here too. Don't they come from beetle skins or something weird like that?
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