[jrblasde]

It's been a couple of months since I've gotten to touch this console, but I'm back! I think I mentioned on a different thread that my wife and I bought our house last year. This year we were finally able to replace the windows. Our home was built in 1957 and still had the original windows. While those older, wooden window frames and sashes are arguably the most beautiful, ours were not salvageable. Most of the windows had been painted shut, the wood was soft and rotted in various areas, and the windows were extremely energy inefficient. We got them replaced, and fortunately the rot was contained only to the windows--the structural wood underneath was fine! After the windows were installed, I then began repainting all the new interior and exterior trim. In fact, I ended up repainting the entire interior of our house. Everything (the walls, trim, ceilings, cabinets) were a flat white, and it was impossible to keep it clean looking (particularly the trim; NEVER use flat white on trim). I went with a semi-gloss white for the trim, and we chose various earth tones for the rooms (an eggshell "pure earth" brown for the living room and hallway, an eggshell "muted sage" green for the dining room and kitchen, an eggshell "red curry" red for the office, an eggshell "dark storm cloud" blue for the two bedrooms, and a satin "creamy mushroom" tan color for the bathrooms). In addition to that, I had the help of a coworker to build a new six-foot privacy fence along the north wall of our back yard. We used to have a chain-link fence, and last year we had two thirty-foot trees cut down which were growing through the fence line (that was a project of it's own, last October, because no tree company would touch the two stumps with that chain-link fence running through the middle of them; I burned through thirteen chainsaw chains to finally cut the portion of the stumps with the fencing out, so that a stump grinding guy would agree to finish the rest of it). We had those trees cut down because one was splitting and the other had large branches laying on our house and the neighbor's house. Since that portion of the fence was sacrificed last fall, we needed to replace the fence.

This last week I finally returned my attention to the Philco cabinet restoration. I finished a couple of other small veneer repairs, and then yesterday I got the cabinet out to my garage to strip it of its finish. Honestly, I've never seen such a crackling and flaky top coat! My plan now is to address a couple of other small repairs which are now apparent, and then I'm going to use a two-part wood bleach on it so that the new veneer patches match the old veneer in color before I start refinishing it. I had tested this two-part bleach on the top panel that I re-veneered earlier this year, and I found that it did an excellent job of removing the purple-grey tones of newer walnut veneer. That tone fades over time with UV exposure, but I need the new veneer to match the original before I refinish.