Saturday, April 13, 2013

Stripping.

I never posted pictures of my garden last, oh, July. Because I haven't updated the blog since then.

But here's this year's garden-in-training!


If I had a dollar for every time I was asked the question, "So are you guys still working on the house?" I'd have enough dollars to pay someone else to do it. Alas, people are good at handing out questions, not dollars.

Prep for doing those floors continues. We're in a bit of a paint stripping quagmire. It takes SO long. As I told Mike's parents the other day, it's the reverse of watching paint dry, and just about as exciting.

But here's what it looks like.
This is the hallway as of my last blog post:

Here it is again, this morning.






Since last summer, we've (I think) perfected the paint stripping process to safely take off the paint without harming ourselves or the 120-year-old wood trim.

First, we use heat guns on the low setting to peel the paint up off of the wood. You have to be super careful when doing this - the wood can scorch, and things can catch on fire if you're not careful. You can also burn the bejeezus out of yourself, as the scars on my hands show.

After the paint is mostly gone, things in our house look like this:


There are some dark spots, some paint left over, and a whole heck of a lot of old shellac. Now shellac can be stripped using nothing but denatured alcohol (like rubbing alcohol on 'roids), but since we have paint in the mix, we have to break out the nasty stuff.

Here are my implements of destruction:

In that picture, you'll see paint stripper, two types of steel wool, a scrubbie pad, a paintbrush, a Dremel multi-tool, a coffee can, a brush, a spackle knife, and - do you see them? - dental picks.

That's right. Dental picks. Because our woodwork looks like this, and there are ten layers of paint (color: Landlord White) in each of those little tiny carvings. And all of that paint needs to be picked out.


To make it even more complicated, the paint stripper is horribly nasty toxic shiz. If it touches your skin, it burns like heck. If it goes in your eye, your eyeball probably boils or something. You absolutely must have ventilation when using the stuff, unless you want to wake up dead. And the stripper's fumes are extremely flammable. So you have to open the windows, but you can't use a space heater or anything that could spark.

So, all of you hypothetical people who are giving me dollars, it was a cold winter. I bundled up as best as I could, but when it's 20 degrees and windy, it's pretty miserable work. It got put off a lot, I fully admit.

It's on now that the weather is warming up. That makes it sound exciting. Let me reset your expectations. 

Today I worked on stripping the shellac/paint from about 10:30 until 12:30. I took a break for lunch, and then worked again from 1:00 until about 3:00. So that's four hours.  

See the difference?

 No? You can't tell? Jeez.

See the curlicue thing on the left in the picture below? And the upside-down newel post thingie? That's the grand total of what I accomplished in four full hours of stripping.

So we're getting there. But it's slow going.

Thankfully, since we started this crazy house project, we've both grown older wiser and more patient. So stay tuned, though not with your breath held.

We have ambitions of doing something with our roof soon (yikes) and fixing our drainage situation so that we don't get basement flooding. But until then, we're stripping paint and taking it day by day.