An Unexpected White Mystery
Y’all know I have recently returned the door opening to its original location on the north wall. And while the frame seems to be the original frame the door itself was originally the basement door. The original library door? Vanished.
One of the last library projects is to refinish the door as it is caked with sloppy paint jobs. Oh, the horror.
The stripping begins! But…why is there white under the brown?
And why is the white paint unaffected by the stripper? Huh????????
Ross is quite gobsmacked.
Last year I started to refinish the original pantry door and found, as expected, the original layer of shellac under the many later coats. Thus, I anticipated same with the basement door.
All I can think of is that the kitchen-facing side of the door was shellacked originally but the stair-facing side was painted white? And with milk paint, which is impervious to paint stripper?
Can I get the white off?
I anticipate that these questions will soon be answered.
And I do love unraveling a mystery.
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Ammonia will remove milk paint. I learned this years ago from the pages of the Old House Journal magazine.
It’s probably gesso. I’m not sure what you’d remove it with.
I wouldn’t think so. Gessso has chalk in it. I can’t see why anyone would use that on woodwork. Also, it would be a flat finish. Not the deisired look for any house.
No. In fact, I’m going to remove the probably and say it IS gesso. Don’t forget, they didn’t have primer back in 1885 or whenever, so they needed something to prime the wood with when they were doing a faux finish without the grain showing through. They were probably cheap pine or spruce doors made to look like a more expensive wood. And, you know, I’ve seen it before, what with having been a carpenter for forty something years.
Let us know what works. The smaller of two bedrooms in my old house, originally for the three daughters of the original owner, has BLUE milk paint on all the trim. It has been painted over without proper priming, so all the white is coming off. I have contemplated just stripping the white, since the blue looks intact underneath. But I would like to know what actually works.
Found this on Google…https://www.realmilkpaint.com/blog/tips/how-to-remove-milk-paint/
Intriguing about the different door finish. I’m sure you’re correct about the different, painted finish for the stair side, what a “fun” surprise!
I discovered the hard way that the original milk paint finish on my 1929 house’s wood trim is impervious to all my attempts to remove it, short of sanding it off. Maybe I’ll try Michael’s suggestion about ammonia next go-around, see what happens. Though I really hate the smell… might not be worth it!
The house is Colonial Revival. I don’t like the original color of the woodwork, like coffee with too much milk in it. Was really hoping to get back to an original shellac finish, but that’s just not what was there originally.
So, the trim is slowly getting stripped down to the ugly milk paint and then primed/painted white. At least my paint job is crisp, unlike the decades of layers I remove. Lots of work to go from “sloppy white paint” to “crisp white paint”. Can’t win ’em all.
Another possibility is that the door originally has some sort of faux grained surface. My parent’s house (1892) had faux grained doors and woodwork throughout. The windows at my house (1894) came with a faux grained finish (perhaps because the rest of the woodwork was finished with shellac and that really does not stand up to intense sunlight and condensation in Minnesota windows). All of the wood that had a faux finish at both houses has that same kind of inpenetrable ground layer which I suspect is a gesso-like substance. I was able to strip the windows with a paste paint remover that I covered with plastic wrap or foil for at least 24 hours but even that did not remove the white haze from the grain. I only stripped them to get a firm, smooth base to apply new faux finish.
Hi, Carrie! Most of the doors (and trim) in the Cross House have a faux bois finish (fake wood), but the servant’s areas. These would have been as plain as could be.
If you’re going to do a faux bois finish over it anyway, rather than strip the white off, why not just paint over it with your base and then do the finish?
That was my first thought as well!
The paint might be linseed oil paint too, which isn’t touched by the solvent-based paint strippers I’ve tried. It does react to heat to some extent and caustic strippers are fairly efficient at removing it. So I’d try a caustic stripper if I was really set on removing the paint.
I sometimes wonder if milk paint on woodwork was really as much of a thing in the US as the internet seems to suggest. In Europe milk paint was quite common for plaster walls and ceilings but woodwork was almost exclusively painted with linseed oil paints well into the 1950s when modern oil paints came into widespread use.
My Mother used to have a refinishing business… I spent HOURS trying. to remove milk paint from a maple spindle bed. Then….I tried something out of desperation…ammonia …. Trumpets from on high! GLORY!!! THE ANSWER!!!
Worked like a charm! No muss, no fuss, no messy pastes,cheap like Borscht, it was GONE!!!! Oh the small triumphs of youth! (44 years ago)