When An "Authentic" Finish Is Not An Advisable Finish

My mom called this morning, which, in itself, is not surprising, but when both of your parents are more than eighty years old, you hold your breath each time their number shows up on the caller ID. This time she had a floor refinishing question, not for herself, but for her next door neighbor who lives in a large Midwestern foursquare built during the Arts & Crafts era.

“Marilyn wants sand off the polyurethane and put on a floor wax instead,” she explained.

I immediately had a flashback to 1990 and my experience with a floor wax in my 1914 Arts & Crafts home. A previous owner or two had sanded nearly a quarter-inch of wood off the quartersawn oak floors, then laid down a thick, glossy coat of polyurethane varnish. The golden oak floors simply did not match the original nut-brown stained woodwork and doors, so I resolved to strip (not sand) off the polyurethane, use a medium brown stain to simultaneously darken the floors and highlight the grain, then finish the floors just as I would a piece of Arts & Crafts furniture: with two coats of orange shellac topped with a coat of quality wax.

Big mistake.

Using Formby’s Paint & Poly Remover to soften and lift the polyurethane, I stripped, scraped and lightly hand-sanded the floors before staining them. The shellac looked fantastic and dried in minutes, but I knew that shellac alone was far too fragile a finish for a floor, so I embarked upon the last step: waxing the floors. I rubbed, I buffed and I even polished the floor wax with a mechanical polisher. The floors looked unbelievable – but that was when the problems began.

At first I thought it was just a coincidence that people began falling down when they walked across my living room floor. Or that the dogs began to whimper whenever they approached the doorway – and tiptoed across it like they were crossing thin ice. Not only did the rugs seem to slide around on their own, so did the furniture. Big furniture. Like settles and Morris chairs.

To make matters even worse, the slightest move left a scuff mark in the wax. Thinking I needed to buff it to a harder sheen, I drug the polisher out again and only succeeded in making the floor more slippery than it had been earlier. My family began to complain. The boys would go outside and walk around the house rather than risk crossing through the living room to get to the kitchen.

Finally, I conceded. My experiment with an authentic Arts & Crafts floor finish had been a failure. It took five gallons of mineral spirits and several rolls of paper towels, but I finally removed the last of the wax. After a light sanding of my base coat of shellac, I brushed on the first of two coats of a satin polyurethane varnish. And, I had to admit, I could hardly tell the difference – except this time the finish didn’t scuff and people didn’t keep falling down. And the furniture stayed in place….

“Give Marilyn my number,” I replied, “and have her call me. Today.”

-bj