Restored Baseboards Almost Done

Here are the baseboards after three coats of golden pecan. By the way, stainable wood putty is not stainable, no matter what the can says.

After two coats of polyurethane.

The shoe molding didn't take the stain as well. After four coats they matched the floors pretty well, so I decided that was good enough.

I was worried the baseboards were going to turn out too rustic. You can definitely see signs of age--dark spots, mottling, etc. Or perhaps I just did a bad job of removing all the dark stain. Once P applied the shoe molding and the remnants of white paint were covered, they look pretty good. Not perfect, but an old house should have character. I'm pretty happy.

I need to give them a light sanding and one more coat of polyurethane and they'll be done!
What do you think?

On a different note, check out the big hole in the wall in the photo below. That's the access to the area below my (broken) air conditioner. The former hall closet was turned into an A/C closet at some point in the past.

They never removed the carpeting. When my A/C decided to leak all over the place, it got the gross, old carpeting all soggy and even more gross.

You can see the unpainted baseboards on the inside of the "closet."

I've had a fan blowing in there trying to dry it out. The repairman is coming back Thursday. This will be the 4th visit. He is going to try to clean my (apparently dusty) coil and see if the drain pan is cracked. This could be a $300-$500 problem or a $1,500-$6,000 problem. Wish me luck!