Strippin’

I think only here on this blog can I say I am stripping and people know I am talking about paint and not clothes 🙂  My husband was so proud of his door today that he asked me to take a picture of the before and after.  He took the spare bedroom door down to take outside and try his new handy dandy stripper he bought.  I have to say, it works quite well!  It works better than anything I have ever used.  It is also blonde proof, it turns blue when it is ready to come off.  I get impatient and try to start scraping the paint off before its ready.  With a scraper and a copper steel wool-like thingy, he got two or three layers of paint off in three hours.  I was excited that it came off so easily.  I was ready to start on the hall again.  We have beautiful burly/curly pine wainscoting in the hall that is begging to come out from under 48 years of paint.  The only bad thing about the stripper is that it is not “green”.  It is some serious mambo jambo!  The stripper is called: Klean Strip, Premium Stripper, Color Change Paste.  A lot of people asked me what I used (umm, or what my husband used!  I cannot take credit for this one!).  This stripper pulls the paint off unlike anything I have ever seen.  I know it is not “green”, but all of the green methods I have used take a long time and do not strip paint as well as this product.  I have used the heat gun too.  The heat gun method is good for small areas, but if you have a serious job to do (like us, ALL of the trim and doors in our entire house were painted over about forty-eight years ago, and again about twenty years ago), I would recommend Klean Strip.  The paste is good for vertical jobs since it is thicker and clings to the surface and does not run down the wood work.

I can’t wait to sand the door down and re-stain it.  The next stripping project I have my eye on is the fireplace mantel in the spare room.  It has faces in the column.  It is very neat, but it has so much paint gooked on it that it is hard to make out the details.  About three hours way, in New Orleans, there is salvage company called The Bank.  It is awesome!   It is a warehouse full of architectural salvage.  Even more so now after Hurricane Katrina.  Anyway, they have a large vat of paint stripper and for about $200-$250 or so, they will take a fireplace mantel/door, etc. and dunk it into the vat and spray off all of the paint.  It is great for fireplaces or large items that are intricately carved and have paint gooked in it.  I have heard that it is clean when it comes out!  I may give it a try sometime in the near future.  I will keep you posted on the results, if I do.

Well, anyway, here is the door.  My husband is six feet tall, by the way.  So, that shows you how big the door really is.  I am starting to get excited.  We have been in blah mode through the Summer and into the Fall.  After our construction loan did not work out, we were really annoyed that we lost 5 months during which we could have been working.  Oh well, time to get busy now.