Friday, November 30, 2012

Paint stripping progress

Been spending a couple hours each evening working on paint stripping.  Well most evenings.  Today Celia and I cleaned out the pond since all the leaves are now off the trees.  Here is an updated picture of the door I have been working on:

As I make progress, I am getting excited about the the finish coat.  Ill will be nice to finish something. I have been researching shellac which has been quite a learning experience.  Along these lines, I found someone selling old windows on Craigslist (cheap) and I plan reuse the wavy glass from them.  I find it funny how at every turn in this project I have to learn something new.  Now it is glass cutting, lol.  I also ordered some Sarco Glazing Putty (Type M) for the glass.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

When blogging isn't enough, make a video!

Made my first Youtube video!  It is a howto on how to strip paint from old hinges.  Enjoy!


Sunday, November 25, 2012

More paint scraping

Today my time was mostly spent with the family.  We went to a close friend's wedding reception.  Afterwards, I was able to get a couple hours of work done on the house.  As you can see I am starting to remove paint from around the door.  I snapped this picture because I finished removing most of the paint from the transom window.  I couldn't resist hanging it back up in the frame to see how it looked. This is probably the first time this window has moved freely in a LONG time. I cant wait to have working transoms!

QUESTION:  I discovered that the window glass is set with glazing putty.  Not too surprising, I guess. My question is what color I should paint the putty?  All the trim will eventually be shellaced, so I am unsure if I should paint the glazing putty white, or if I should paint it a brownish/tan color to blend in with the wood color.  Thoughts?

Saturday, November 24, 2012

Stripping Down

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving.  We sure did.  We also have been using the long weekend to work on the house.  We have been a little burnt out again on the kitchen so we have been focusing our efforts of the kid's room.

I removed all of the carpet in the room.  I did it myself and it went quite smoothly.  I used the technique that I perfected when removing the carpet in the dining room several months ago.  I pulled the carpet up 3 foot at a time, cut the backing, and then rolled it up into little bundles.  Each bundle was tied with twine which will make it easy to put it out for trash day. Under the carpet (1993 vintage) was a layer of Masonite.  I pulled up a piece of it to take a peek at the original 1x5 pine plank floor underneath.  From the small section I looked at it looked in pretty good condition.  We strongly considered ripping out all the Masonite and restoring the floor.  Instead, Celia talked me into keeping carpet in this room.  It will be the kids room and wall-to-wall carpet will be a little more comfortable for them.  I am excited to try restoring the original floors in some of the other 2nd story rooms though...

Notice all the staples?  The perimeter of the Masonite is stapled every 2 inches.

We also finished demo on a false wall that concealed an old radiator pipe that ran from the basement to the attic.  Once the wall was down, I sawzalled the pipe and removed it.  Here is the wallpaper we found trapped inside the little wall.


Celia and I also attacked the molding in this room.  If you remember, this molding is all pine.  It has been covered in lots of paint over the years.  The original coat was a faux wood graining called faux bois, which  I blogged about last year. The molding in this room is quite nice.  Lots of bumps and ridges, and curves.  I am going to make sure my next house has the plainest, squarest molding possible because picking paint out of all the grooves REALLY SUCKS!

Mostly stripped.  This shot was taken after Celia worked with a dental pick type scraper to remove the bits of paint in the ribbed area.


Some of our friends and family have questioned our decision to strip all this molding since it is "just pine".  I understand that staining today's modern pine wood is usually not done because of its' inferior qualities regarding grain and stain absorption.  However, I have seen pictures of old-growth pine  that have finished up beautifully.
Examples from around the internet:



Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Hardwood Floor Patch

In my last post, I mentioned that one of my jobs was to patch a rotten spot in the floor.  Over many years, a heating radiator had leaked.  The new floor material was salvaged from the adjacent kitchen so I am confident that it will blend in nicely when we get around to refinishing the floor.  Here are the before and after photos:




Sunday, November 11, 2012

Weekend Update

This weekend was unseasonably warm for Illinois.  The temp was 72 on Saturday!!!  Dad, Celia, and I took advantage of the weather and got lots of the little stuff marked off my list:


  • Rebuilt the master bath toilet.
  • Patched a rotten spot in the hardwood floors where an old radiator leaked for many years. (Actually quite a big job!)
  • Drywalled a bit of the kitchen
  • Mowed the yard
  • Fixed the electronic eye that was preventing one of the garage doors openers from functioning
  • Prepared the snow blower for winter
  • Moved a set of pocket doors from the garage to inside the house (see pic below).
  • Demolished the walls going into the laundry room.  It used to have ugly 80's pocket doors and the wall needed to be re-framed.
  • Cleaned the gutters on the garage
This pair of pocket doors was found in the garage when we bought the house. Someone spent lots of time stripping them so they need a few very minor repairs and then will be ready for stain.   Here, Celia is bushing off all the webs and spiders from this massive 36" x 9'4" door.