@wjcstp It was pretty unpleasant with the relatively mild alcohol vapor, paint solvent sounds horrible. I usually plan ahead better, this was definitely a matter of just not knowing the tools and being in a hurry. On the plus side, its a lot better than finding out about the alcohol vapor cloud by shellacking a door in the basement where the gas water heater is.
I was also glad this was 3# cut shellac right out of the can, which is mostly ethyl alcohol with a little bit of isopropyl. The upper coats are thinned with denatured alcohol, even the green version contains some methanol. That stuff truly scares me.
A foggy evening of wood finishing
For anyone reading this in the future, we've switched back to brushing shellac on other floors. The sprayer method was much faster, the finish decent overall but resulted in some orange peeling. Particularly hard to control when the shellac started running out, with the angle it had a tendency to sputter resulting in uneven areas. Also very messy, and rather unpleasant.
Great idea on the sprayer though, i've worked with shellac enough to know how tricky multiple coats can be on a large area.