Not Great, But Good Enough. Words To Live By

Now I’m going to ask you to round up some weird stuff if you want to follow along with grain-painting a door. The stuff is actually mundane, not weird, but I’ll call it weird because you’re probably not used to seeing it on the shelf at a home center, or used in the way I’m using it. But it won’t bite you or anything. Never fear.

First, we’re using Kilz primer, the alkyd-based kind, to coat the door. Then we’re getting a pint of raw sienna colorant. It’s the same stuff you see them squirt into your paint cans when you have them mixed at the hardware store. You can buy it in little tubes if you prefer, but we’re not painting doll houses here. Get big pints and slop it around and keep it on the shelf to inspire awe in visitors to your shop. Whoah, this guy buys ink by the barrel, and pigment by the pint. Best not mess with him.

So, how much colorant do you put in there, Sippican? Beats me. I squirt some in until it looks like the desert, and I’m done. Let’s paint (prime) the door with it.

Well, now. That’s sort of a garish color, isn’t it? This is where the meek falter, generally. I’ve ruined my door! Trust me, we’ve not yet begun to ruin the door! The background color for grain painting is supposed to be a kind of blah yellowish tone. If you took all the finish off a piece of woodwork, and removed the grain, this is more or less what it would look like.

The reason we used Kilz primer is because it dries super-quick. You can work on it the same day, just hours apart, if you like. We like. Now we get some glazing liquid. I used to use alkyd glazing liquid for this sort of work, because it had a longer “open” time, but we’re not looking for photographic realism on this job (just looking for grainy photographs lost in seventeen folders scattered all over my computer desktop). I think Brits call it scumble, but any water-based glaze made for decorative finishes will do. You’ll need a second pint of pigment, raw umber. It makes a rich, dark brown, with a vaguely greenish tint in there somewhere.

We start with the muntin bars. If you look at the brush in the paint pot, you can see that it’s suffering from bristles interruptus. It’s a faux finish brush that has every other 1/4″-worth of bristles missing. Officially, it’s called a strie brush. I have boxes filled with arcane brushes like that, in all sizes, because I used to do wild finishes in mansion-y places. You can use a crummy chip brush and not worry too much about it, but a strie brush makes it easier to mimic wood grain because it naturally segments the glaze into something resembling the railroad-track lines of wood grain. You can also flog the glaze while it’s wet. Flogging is simply taking a brush with flexible bristles and beating it up and down on the wet glaze to make what looks like check grains, the little disconnected dashes you see in the grain of woods like oak. We don’ t need to flog the surface, because we’re going to use combs.

You can buy a set of metal combs for graining for short money. You drag them through the wet glaze at oblique angles to the lines made by the strie brush. They very quickly and efficiently make oak-looking grain in the glaze, like in the last picture.

Once the muntin bars are glazed and combed, we’ll work on stiles and rails. Use painter’s tape to cordon off areas where the grain changes directions. The primer is vaguely absorbent, and it’s hard to wipe excess glaze off completely. First you lay on the glaze with the strie brush if you have it, following the direction that the wood would be oriented in. I liked typing “wood would” an inordinate amount. I’ll bet it would give an editor a seizure, if I had one.

Now we’re going deep into the “quick and dirty” portion of our project. You see that piece of cardboard? That’s what we’re using to make grain lines in the glaze. Of course my cardboard is dark brown and covered with lines from a failed grain-painting experiment from decades ago, but you can use any kind of cardboard. Me, when I get my hands on a good piece of cardboard, I hold on to it like grim death. Cut a series of random notches in the edge of the cardboard, wrap a scrap of old T-shirt over the edge, and drag it through the glaze. You vary the angle of the cardboard from perpendicular to the grain to change the spacing of the lines. Wood is seldom completely straight grained, but don’t overdo the squigglyness of it if you want it to look like real wood.

Now we get out the big combs. There’s two bigger ones on display next to the work. Drag them at slight angles to the direction of the grain, and use two different comb spacings to get the broken grain effect of oak.

The grain gets a little harder to mimic on the long side stiles. Those boards on a door usually have what it called heart grain, not just wiggly railroad tracks. Heart grain is what is revealed as wood is cut straight across the width of a tree. You get a kind of sawtooth, or swirling effect in the center. Back in the day, we used to draw the heart grain in with paint brush, like an artist would. Another method was to glaze the panel solid, and then remove the glaze from around the sawtooth lines with your thumb wrapped in cotton cloth. They’re both too much work. We’ll dig out an old graining roller (the black cylinder in the photo), and drag that through the glaze down the center of the panel. You sort of rock it back and forth while you drag it to make the sawtooth shapes you see. You can do it over and over until you get a pattern you like. Just repaint with glaze and start over if you muck it up the first time.

Now is where people usually screw this up. The center of the board is sawtoothed, but the edges shouldn’t be, if you want it to look real. After you fiddle with the graining roller in the center, drag the left and right sides with your notched cardboard scraper to get the wavy parallel line look. Drag the combs through the lines when you’re satisfied with the look of the grain.

OK, now the graining is done. As you can see, the bright yellow background is more subdued at this point. It almost looks like unfinished wood. Now we’ll give it an overglaze, to give the impression that the grain isn’t right on the surface, and to give the door the right shade to match what we have in the house.

I mixed this glaze myself, using TransTint dyes. They’re great stuff. You can put them in any sort of finish. But knowing how to color match from dye, and putting in the right amount, is challenging. If you’re not feeling experimental, you can buy any number of varnish stain products at the home center, and coat your work with one you select, pre-made from a color chart.

So we put the door back in its hole, and the grain looks about right compared to the ropy oak doorframes that surround it. We flipped a coin to choose whether we’d try to match the woodwork in the living room or the hall, and the hall won. Here’s the hallway side.

Not great, but good enough. Hey, maybe that should be our motto around here. It certainly was good enough for that doorway, because we demolished that wall a few years later. More about that in another episode.

[Thanks for reading and commenting. Please recommend Sippican Cottage blog to your internet friends, or regular friends, if you have any.]

Fast and Furious: Grain Painting

I’m short on pictures of stuff I’m doing. I’m usually going too quickly and sloppily to allow time for snaps. My wife, who I adore, can’t take a picture to save her life. Her doctor told her that even her x-rays come out fuzzy. My children are too busy being morose while they help me to add documenting their morosity to their workload. I generally take bad pictures myself, and I’m too busy thinking about important things like is morosity a word? Dammit, it should be, to take photos of what I’m doing while I’m doing it. I never carry a cellphone on my person if I can avoid it, and that adds to the vast interregnums in the visual feast. So you’re stuck with me describing things, and telling hoary old stories. Sorry.

Hey, do you want to grain-paint a door? I have a few pictures of that. This door was about the worst job I ever did using the technique, but I have several fuzzy pictures of it. I could regale you with stories of my time in the faux bois milieu, the faux marbre scene, man, or my time in the trompe l’oeil salt mines, chained to a scaffold. I will testify that I was pretty good at it — as long as there’s nobody around who’s actually seen my work. I dabbled in it. You have to work at it for a long time to get really good.

But one aspect of it I did master was how to do a slapdash job going really fast. That I can show you. Let’s grain a door in less time than it takes to paint it properly, and see how it turns out.

Here’s our victim. It’s a salvage door, stuck in one of the 723 empty door frames we found in our house. The former occupants seemed to have spent most of their waking hours removing doors and losing them somewhere, in between bouts of adding ceiling fans. These pictures are from years back. That’s the foyer beyond the door, and the office where I’m typing this further on. It got colder than a tax assessor’s heart right there between the front door and the staircase. We got tired of having cold fronts moving through the living room, and stratocumulus clouds forming around the light fixture, so I rammed a salvage door in the opening. There were problems, of course, because I breed trouble like minks. I wrap myself in problems to keep warm with fixing them. Well, warm-ish.

The doors in my house are were a full 7′ tall. It’s a big Victorian with high ceilings, and millwork to match. The knobs are lower than the more modern arrangement, because people back then were raised on a diet of suet, gruel, and cigars, and it stunted their growth, I gather. I couldn’t afford a new door for the opening, or even a salvage door from a vendor. But I saved this glass door from a dumpster years back, and figured I could use that. I glued a couple of strips on the edges to make it wide enough for the opening, and a block on the top to make it tall enough. I screwed a piece of shingle over the bored hole for the knob, to keep the interior weather from passing through.

You might wonder why I didn’t flip the door and keep the knob hole where it was. Well, this is where I admit embarrassing things. The doorframe was solid oak, and if you think I’m going to chisel out two new hinge mortises and a striker plate mortise out of solid oak, when I can keep them and chisel them out of a soft pine door, you don’t know me very well.

OK, take the door down and remove the patch over the borehole. As you can see, even if I wasn’t too lazy to chisel out the oak door frames, the knob hole is in the wrong place anyway (it’s too far from the edge of the newly widened door. It’s a pain in the arse to fill something like that in solid, and then bore a neat hole right next to where it was, right through your patch. So I was smart to give up and do a lousy job, see? This is how I live with myself, by convincing myself I’m smart, not lazy. But I am beset by doubts.

So we make two blocks (one for each side of the door) from the fat end of a shingle (you heard me). It doesn’t matter how big it is, it’s just got to be larger than the hole you’re covering.

There’s that straight router bit again. There are all sorts of fancy router bits and jigs for cutting the inside and outside of a patch like this. I think I own some, actually, but where they might be is a mystery. I wouldn’t use them if I could find them. We’re not setting up the tools over and over, and worrying about how marvelous this job turns out. Quick and dirty, remember? You never measure anything if you don’t have to. Lay the patch on the router base, adjust the router so its depth is slightly less than the patch (we don’t want a square swimming pool in the door. We prefer a lump, thanks). Rout it out freehand, and finish it off with a chisel and mallet. The router makes a nice, flat surface to glue on.

Glue the block in, and then flip the door over and do it again. Remind yourself not to take pictures with an atrocious knot on display. No one will suspect that you cut a 2 x 4 in half to make the new door edges, so don’t leave evidence like that to put them on the scent.

Sand the block flush with a belt sander if you have one. This is why you use a shingle for the block. If the block is softer than the door, you’ll sand it flush and the patch will disappear. If the block is harder wood than the door, you’ll gouge the door around the block trying to get it flat, and end up with a valley with a mesa in the middle. When it’s painted it won’t matter what it’s made of, really.

There’s the door, ready to go. If you’re smart (lazy) like me, you’ll tape out the glass with painter’s tape. I can paint straight lines against glass panes all day long without missing, but I doubt you can, and we’re not going to be painting straight lines anyway. We’re going to be slopping and mooshing and generally making a mess, and it’s easier to peel tape than get coatings off of glass.

[To be continued. If you’d like to support Sippican Cottage, keep reading, leave a comment, tell a friend about us, buy a book, or dump some toll change in the tip jar. Thanks!]