We LOVE wood and all its beautiful grains. Anytime we go somewhere that has beautiful exposed wood, we both stop in awe and can’t help but admire it.

Therefore our initial thought on the house inside was take it back down to the bare wood and stain it, at least in the entry way, parlor and ballroom. But did the wood under all those years of paint have a grain and quality to stain? And before you say it, yes, we know it would be a LOT of work to take this on, but we’d have to do it anyway, at least in some cases even if we wanted to repaint it.

You see the years of paint over paint over paint again…have created a build up of paint globs into the details and erased visually so much of the woodwork trim elements. Also at the bottom of the door frames, there are rolls of dried paint, likewise into the trim details. So you see either way, we needed to address it.

Over the last few months I’ve worked off and on removing the paint from the right side ballroom column and pedestal. It was tedious to say the least. Even the best paint strippers we found were a painstaking process and the infamous heat lamp method only took off the 1st layer, while seamingly baking the layers underneath onto the wood. And such it was back to stripping and scraping the old fashioned way (scraping oh so gently might I add), which ultimately seemed to be the only option.

Eventually we arrived at this point…and then…

…the question suddenly became, “well, wait a minute…should we really stain this? I mean look…

or do we paint it back? Remember the outside columns on the porch are white. What were these intended to be? Maybe we stain other areas instead? And if so, where? Now that we’ve done this much, we’re not sure it’s right.

This house since the beginning definitely seemed to “tell” us what should be done, and in what order. This in both design and structure. We would get to a cross roads of what now or how should we approach this area? Then something would catch our eye from the house’s original siding, or support beams or a hidden design element and it would direct us. That’s the answer! And we would proceed. (I’ll admit I prefer the design-wise “conversations” rather than the structure-wise but all in all, it works and we get it done. I’ll share the kitchen “conversation” we had recently with the house soon! LOL)

See below some of the hidden details in the woodwork that years of paint over paint jobs long since concealed the detail. This was in the kitchen.

In the kitchen, we definitely want to stain the wood. That one, we’ve confirmed. To be sure though, we had to test the wood were we stripped it. And we found it took the stain BEAUTIFULLY.

As we began demolishing more of the kitchen and removed one of the newer boards (within the last 60 or 70 years) which had been up against the trim work we just stained, we saw that on the side, where we had not yet stained it, in between bits of old paint, it had been originally stained (or varnished) but it matched the color! So for staining, we were on the right track in the kitchen!