The Stripping Post

     I promised a post on my stripping adventure, so here it is. We have been working on our dinning room umm well since we moved in over a year ago.  We have fixed the cracks in the wall and gotten rid of the texture, and now we are wanting to paint.  Well I can't just paint over the door from the dinning room to the kitchen. It has so many cracks and places where old paint has chipped off then the next person just painted over it--yuck.

Step 1: take off the hardware

     So the first thing I did was take off the hardware and get all my supplies together.

Pretty picture.  I also covered the floor

     I started with the Citristrip, gloves (instructions say these are NOT the kind you should use, but I had them so they are what I used), tray, paint brush, and plastic scraper (instructions said plastic). What I later used: brown paper bag on the floor (then realized I didn't cover enough floor and then next day I used a garbage bag cut open), metal scraper (I had to make sure not to gouge the wood but otherwise it worked much better).

I covered part of the floor. Step 2: cover the paint area in stripper

     I have stripped paint two times before this with the stripper in the can, but had read a positive review of Citristrip, so I decided to get it a try.  Man this stuff was weird.  It is a gel, and can be difficult to spread on the paint.  If you plan on doing something like this you should probably take the door off and lay it horizontally, so the stripper isn't just curling up and falling on the floor.  The Citristrip doesn't smell near as bad as the other strippers, but it wasn't able to get all the paint on this door (at some time I thought the door was made out of paint).

Step3: Wait for it to look like this.

      The chemical stripper will peel the paint right off.  You need to let it sit long enough for it to do its job, but if you let it dry it stops working and is harder to scrap off.  I looked up some tips online and saw that some people recommended spraying it with distilled alcohol and since I didn't have any distilled alcohol, so with my indentured servant's approval I used rubbing alcohol. Well I don't know if distilled alcohol works, but rubbing alcohol really doesn't. I actually think it may have dried it quicker. 

Step 4: Scrape the paint off

     So once you see the paint curl up, test a section and if the paint is coming off keep scraping it off. It is best if you can get your indentured servant to do this.  You may also be able to trick get your husband to help by telling him how much fun it is. I will not lie, this is hard work, and I think we should have done it in two parts.  

Step 5: Keep scraping

     If you have an old house like ours (built in 1938) then don't believe that this stuff will actually strip all the layers of paint.

Step 6: Clean up the mess

     So our old house with 17,098 layers of paint, made a large mess.

Oops

     I didn't cover up our nice wood floors in the dinning room and the paint fell on it.  Because of the stripper and the old enamel oil paint it is not coming up. We refinished all of the hardwood floors in our house before we moved in, so I am not freaking out. It just means you will get a post about how to refinish hardwood floors later on.
     Here it is over a week later. I got up thinking that I would just sand what was left (maybe an hour) then prime, and paint it.  Well all the sander did was heat up the old enamel oil paint (covering the sand paper) and spread it on the door while sealing the blob of paint to a different spot. I was not happy with this so what was supposed to take an hour turned into another chemical stripping adventure. After stripping again, I decided it was good enough to prime, then paint.  It still needs another coat or two of paint, but here is what it looks like now.

The things I want to do this weekend

     The last three weekends we have been traveling. It has been great seeing all our friends and family and getting in some vacation time before school starts back for me.  The down side of all this is that all the things that normally get done on the weekend get pushed to the weekdays or pushed to the next weekend available. Well here it is, a weekend where we are not going anywhere, we can finally get to all those dreaded tasks that have been pushed off and hopefully to one of the projects that is floating around in my head.





     A little confession, I am not the best house keeper. Neill and I tried really hard to keep a clean house earlier in our marriage, but it has slipped to the way side. But at the end of last month our house looked like a tornado, earthquake, and a cat. 5 hurricane hit inside our house. That also was about the time our indentured servant moved in.  Thankfully she got to work cleaning and killing things in the kitchen which motivated me to at least move the three LARGE boxes (from our new out door patio set) out of the living room.  I think it took us another week or so to move our coffee table back to by the sofas. So we could probably spend all weekend doing normal household chores like scrubbing the bathroom, dusting, vacuuming, and sorting through piles of paper, but I doubt that is what we do.

Dinning room needs some attention

I can't believe I am posting this for all to see

     I think I want to finish stripping and sanding the dinning room/ kitchen door tonight. I think I can also move all the stuff to the middle of the room so we can get our yellow paint (that we bought two weeks ago) on to the wall this weekend. There is also the dog run area that still needs some attention--leveling out dirt and spreading out pine straw.  And then there is the project that I kept saying we would get to this weekend, the front walk way. I love starting new projects. Its the feeling that it will look amazing when it is done, before the feeling of tiredness sets in. I will try to stay focused on the projects I have already started, and resist the urges to start the walk way (or who knows what else).

     What do you have planned for the weekend?

Switching Projects

         When I got home Friday, I had a dilemma - one that I have faced time and time again with this house: should I finish the project that I just started or should I work on a different project? Let me explain my thought process and why this is a dilemma for me.  As you may or may not have figured out I started stripping paint yesterday. It was supposed to be a simple project to prep for a fresh new smooth coat of paint on the dining room/ kitchen door, but like all projects in our house, it was not so simple. After hours of stripping the paint and a few breaks (hey, I had to eat), it became obvious that it was not going to be finished that night, so off to bed I went thinking I would knock it out the next day when I got home.  Well, on Friday I was thinking about the mess it made to strip paint, and how I needed to also pack for our trip to the beach. Then I started thinking about the dog run that Neill and I created but the dogs seemed to hate.  With our leaving the dogs with our indentured servant for the trip, I thought that we should get some pine straw to put down out there because they hate walking on the sand that was left from the brick walkway that was there before.  So yeah that is my reason to switch projects.

Started stripping tonight

I started stripping around 5:30 tonight. It is now past midnight and I am still not done. I will tell you all about it tomorrow later.