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.

Welcome to my home

In May of 2010 my husband and I bought our first house. Ever since we have talked about needing a blog to share this crazy ride with others, so here it is. Let me introduce the main characters of my future blog posts:

Neill and Melissa

Hi! My name is Melissa and I am currently a graduate student studying Industrial/ Organizational Psychology (work psychology). I work as a researcher at the Navy. I love working on our house and doing craft projects. Expect to see more of the latter on here.

Behind me there is my wonderful husband, Neill. We have been together since 2003 and married since 2008. He is an IT guy for the US Dist. Courts. He is super smart (I have actually given him an IQ test), but sometimes he does some of the silliest things. You will probably hear about his antics. Even though working on the house isn't one of his favorite things to do, he can learn how to do anything. Update: Sense the kitchen floors have been finished he is really on board with working on the house.

We are both from Louisiana, but moved to Tennessee for me to go to school. After living in our first apartment (in Louisiana, we rented a house from Neill's grandmother) for a year, we bought our first house. I'll have to post about that later (possibly multiple posts); that alone was an adventure.

Audi

Here is Audi, our first dog. He was left on the side of the road with his sister when they were only about 2 weeks old. A wonderful adoption group in Texas cared for them, and when he was 7 weeks old, we adopted him. With a lot of love he his has grown up, learned a number of tricks, and of course has some problems. We will save those for later.

Drizzt

When Audi was getting calmer and learning to behave, we started to look for a Boston Terrier to adopt and found Drizzt. Not exactly a Boston, but we fell in love. We knew if we didn't adopt him he would probably be euthanized, and he was so calm and quiet. We later found out that he freezes in unknown circumstances, and is a BALL of ENERGY when he is comfortable. His name was Rocco, but didn't respond to that, so I let Neill pick out a new name. He picked Drizzt based on a book where the character Drizzt was a part of a race that was hated and often evil, but Drizzt is a good guy, so it fit with him being an American Pit Bull Terrier. He really knew nothing, and we have taught him a lot, even "roll over" and "dead".

Our newest addition is our indentured servant.

That is my cousin, Allison, also from Louisiana. She was working at Lowes and getting very little art work done. So we offered to let her live in our guest room and work in our back porch area in exchange for a small amount of rent and her controlling our food budget. So she moved in at the beginning of the month and is basically a modern day indentured servant.

And last but not least is our current major project - our house.

Sorry for the dark and out of season picture but it was the only one I could find tonight, but don't worry you will see the good, bad, and ugly soon enough.

I hope you enjoy our journey and our past adventures.

Update: Here is one of the first pictures of our house when we were still looking at it.