I wish I had a few more arms

More work tonight.  I didn’t get nearly as much finished as I had hoped, though.  My plan for tonight was to complete finish sanding the pocket door frame.  Yesterday was spent sanding through 180 grit on all of the mostly-flat pieces that I could get with a pad-based finish sander.  Today I switched to the detail sander and my hands to finish the curvy bits.  I love that MultiMaster, but I love even more this new sandpaper from 3M.  It does still get loaded sometimes when hitting some pockets of old varnish that didn’t get completely stripped, but it is much better than the other stuff I had been using.  That new paper on the MultiMaster–now that’s a thing of beauty.  I was able to zip through most of the sanding on the curvy bits.  I made the decision to only sand them through 120 grit.  This was partly to save some time, partly because I only did the other two windows up through 120, and partly because I have a hard time telling the difference between shellac on a 120 grit sanded surface, and shellac on a 220 grit sanded surface.  Even with the MultiMaster, some of this trim still has to be hand sanded to get into some of the areas.  Before I do the hand sanding, though, I bust out the dental picks and go after any stuck paint bits that were missed during the stripping phase.  After that, I re-sand anything that I had hit with the picks, then hand-sand the necessary areas up to 120 grit. 

Tonight, I was only able to get completely finished with half of the frame.  I’ll have to do the other half tomorrow.  I just got too tired.  I was starting to feel tired on the ladder, which is when I knew it was time for me to clean up and hang-up the mask for the night.  I can’t wait to get some shellac on it, though–I think that it looks really good.  I’m finding a good balance between super-anal-get-all-the-paint-out-no-matter-what side of me, and the hey-I-can’t-see-it-from-five-inches-away-so-just-deal-with-it side of me.  🙂 

In other news, I determined that the hand scrapers I have for woodworking will work great on the baseboards.  There are some areas that we’ll have to sand by hand, but having these tools should make that job go faster. 

jonathan