Page 186

        WOODS AND HOW WE FINISH THEM
such as maple, beech, birch and gumwood, are
more suitable for the woodwork in smaller and
more daintily furnished rooms that are not
so roughly used, such as bedrooms or small
private sitting rooms.  Aside from this general
classification, the choice of wood for interior
woodwork naturally must depend upon the
taste of the home-builder, the requirements of
the decorative scheme planned for the house
as a whole, and the ease with which a par-
ticular kind of wood may be obtained.
  In considering the relative value of our
native woods for interior woodwork, we are
inclined to give first place to the American
white oak, which possesses not only strength
of fiber and beauty of color and markings, but
great durability, as its sttirdiness and the hard-
ness of its texture enables it to \vithstand
almost any amount of wear.     In this respect
it is far superior to the other woods, such as
chestnut, ash and elm, which we have men-
tioned as being in the same general class of
open-textured, strong-fibered woods; although
these, under the right treatment, possess a
color quality finer than that of oak, in that
they show a greater degree of that mellow
radiance which counts so much in the atmos-
phere of a room.      This is especially true of
chestnut, which is so rich in color that it fairly
glows.   But in addition to its dignity and dura-
bility, there is something about oak that stirs
the imagination.  Not only is it suggestive of
the rich somber time-mellowed rooms of old
English houses which have seen generation
after generation live and die in them, but it is
the wood we are accustomed to associate with
nearly all the magnificent carved work of
earlier days.  In fact, oak has come to stand
as a symbol of strength and permanence, and
a great part of our affection for it comes from
the romance and the rare old associations with
which its very name is surrounded.
  There are many varieties of oak in this
country, but of these the white oak is by far
the most desirable, both for cabinetmaking and
for interior woodwork.    One reason for this
is the deep, ripened color it takes on under
the process we use for finishing it,<a process
which gives the appearance of age and mellow-
ness without in any way altering the character
of the wood.    We refer to the fuming with
ammonia, which we have already described in
the preceding chapter.  The fact that ammonia
fumes will darken new oak was discovered by
accident.  Some oak boards stored in a stable
in England were found after a time to have
taken on a beautiful mellow brown tone and
on investigation this change in color was dis-
covered to be due to the ammonia fumes that
naturally are present in stables.  This ripen-
ing, so essential to the beauty of oak wood-
work, takes a long time when left to the un-
aided action of air and sunlight, and the fact
that the wood darkened very quickly when it
was stored in a stable led to experimenting
with the effect of ammonia fumes upon various
kinds of oak.  The reason for this effect was
at first unknown and, to the best of our belief,
it was not discovered until the experiments
with fuming made in The Craftsman Work-
shops established the fact that the darkening
of the wood was due to the chemical affinity
existing between ammonia and tannic acid, of
which there is a large percentage present in
white oak.   This being established, prepara-
tions were at once made for using ammonia
fumes in a practical way, which we have
already described in a preceding chapter.  The
process mentioned there, however, is prac-
ticable only when furniture is to be fumed,
as it is quite possible to construct an air-tight
compartment sufficiently large to hold one or
more pieces of furniture, but when it comes
to fuming the woodwork of a whole room
it is not so easy.  The fuming boxes we use
in The Craftsman Workshops are made of
tarred canvas stretched tightly over large light
wooden   frames    which are padded      heavily
around the bottom so that no air can creep in
between the box and the floor.     The box is
drawn to the ceiling by means of a rope and
pulley; the furniture is piled directly below
and shallow dishes are set around the edges
inside the line that marks the limits of the com-
partment.  The box is then lowered almost to
the floor; very strong aqua ammonia (26 per
cent.) is quickly poured into the dishes and
the box dropped at once to the floor.      The
strength of the ammonia used for this pur-
pose may be appreciated when one remembers
that the ordinary ammonia retailed for house-
hold use is about 5 per cent.
 Of course, for fuming interior woodwork,
the air-tight compartment is hardly practi-
cable; but a fairly good substitute for it may
be obtained by shutting up the room in which
the woodwork is to be fumed, stuffing up all
the crevices as if for fumigating with sulphur
and then setting around on the floor a liberal
number of dishes into which the ammonia is