Trim Time

Stripped paint from dining room woodwork today.

Stripping paint is tedious no matter how I've tried it.

We have 3-4 layers of paint over varnish. The varnish tends to turn into a gummy mess as the paint comes off.

The woodwork is fir and doesn't look that great without paint, so I just want to get it ready for paint. The last paint job apparently was a hurry up slop it on to sell the house paint job. On the other hand, buying the wide 5/4 clear wood that the trim is made of is quite expensive, so I think the old trim is worth salvaging.

Here's what I've tried so far:

• chemicals. makes a big mess as far as I can tell and takes a lot to do a whole house.
• infrared. I made an infrared paint stripper from a space heater. It mostly works but it is slow, and it either takes two people or I have trouble holding the big infrared heater where I want with one hand and trying to scrape the softened paint with the other. The idea behind an infrared stripper is that it gets hot enough to soften the paint but not hot enough to scorch the wood or start a fire behind the woodwork. The commercial infrared stripper costs about $400 last time I checked. My homemade one cost $40, but I think I have the quartz tubes a little too far apart. Maybe the commercial one is easy to hold, anyway, without two people it was just taking too long. I had great hopes for the infrared.
• sanding. The paint and varnish heat up to clog the belt.
• heat gun. I got a $60 Milwaukee heat gun (really just an industrial strength hair dryer looking thing) from Home Depot. It works fine. The scorched wood stories I read seem a little overblown, I haven't had any trouble. It still takes time, I can spend 2 hours on a door frame easy, all day to get all the trim for one room. The heat gun gets 95% of the paint and I smooth out the rest with a sander. Even that last little bit of paint still gums up the belt.

Getting Started

Well, we're a little late to the whole blogging thing.

I read in one book that you ought to keep a journal of your remodel so you can keep yourself motivated and be able to look back on progress made, so here goes.

The house was built in 1924. The previous owners did a fair amount of historical research on the house and the surrounding Old Colorado City characters. There was a period of time during the depression years that the house was abandoned, but has been lived in most of the other years. During the depression years this was kind of the middle of nowhere, halfway between Old Colorado City and Manitou Springs. This area was called Arensdale, but has since been sucked up into the larger Colorado Springs.

I hope in this blog to:

• keep motivated on the project to actually finish (yes we're getting pretty desparate)
• hear from other remodelers
• share some lessons learned (for anyone who cares)
• have some fun