Stripping Wood Doors, Part 42 -- Removing the Moulding Trim Around the Window

I've lost track of how long this project is really taking.

But, weeks after I started stripping the bathroom door, I finally got the rest of the whitish-yellow enamel out of the nooks and crannies. It was a brutal process, completed in the odd moment I found here and there. Here's the door, without its six coats of paint:

Next step is popping out the window glass so I can get the last bits of paint around the moulding trim. Many of the Web sites I found indicated that it wasn't worth saving the trim, that it would take hours to try, and that they should just be chipped out. What I couldn't find were good instructions on how to save them if I wanted to--I was probably using the wrong search terms, but whatever. We managed to figure something out.

I figured it would be more of a hassle to go out and get new trim and miter cut it to the exact proportions, so I really wanted to try reusing them first. So I took a box cutter with a thin blade and gently ran it along the seam to loosen any adhesive and remaining paint. (The box cutter belonged to my grandfather; I love using his old tools!)

Then I took an old screwdriver and a mallet to very gently separate the trim from the frame. A poor use for a screwdriver, I know, but it worked.

There are three nails holding in each piece, with a glob of some kind of adhesive in the corners. I would need to lift out a piece straight up first before removing the others.

I grabbed Ted, who is always happy to find a new use for his Dremmel, and within seconds he had cut through the nails on one side.

Then, using a spatula to protect the glass, he took the screwdriver and gently worked it along the edge to loosen the trim the rest of the way. It then popped straight up. The others quickly followed suit.

Voila! Half an hour from start to finish, we had the trim pieces and glass removed.

And seconds after that, we had the door flipped over to start stripping the other side. This side of the door has some very beat up, very bubbled and flaking shellac. It comes off very, very well with a dab of stripper. I should be able to sand everything in the next day or so. Maybe I'll actually have the door stained and back in place this time next week. We're all getting a little tired of the screen we're using to "give us some privacy."

The bathroom door was, by far, the worst one in the house as far as paint to be stripped. Every door in the basement (there are eight or nine of them, I forget) has paint, but it's a single layer of gray that comes off easily with a heat gun. There is only one other door in the ground floor unit with paint, and it, too, only looks like it has a coat or two of paint on it--and not the evil enamel. (The bathroom door in the tenant unit is equally offensive as this one was, but I won't be addressing that for years, yet.)

So, in other words, I'm glad I started with the worst of the bunch. Everything else is going to be easy after this.

Stripping Wood Doors, Part 3 -- Using Citristrip on the Hardware

We were busy this week doing a few repairs at the rental condo. Between that and client work, I haven't had much time to get back to stripping the bathroom door. But before going to bed last night, I decided I could spare a little time stripping the hardware for it.

I used Citristrip. Remember how the doorknob and plate looked a few days ago?

Here it is now. Ta-dah! Shiny.

And here it is with the rest of the hardware in various states of the stripping process.

Unlike the wood, I only need to leave it on the metal for a half hour or so, and the paint wipes right off. I used a turkey lacer to gently rub it out of the grooves. (It's the long metal needle-like thing with the curved end, on the bottom piece of paper towel.) For soaking, I use a disposable metal tray with a lid. (In this case, a pumpkin cake mold.) The lid keeps the Citristrip from drying out, and I can reuse it again. Afterwards, I wash everything in mild dish soap. It's important to bag and tag everything so as to remember where all the parts came from--there are dozens of tiny screws, in different sizes.

We won't be doing anything to polish the old brass parts; I rather like the patina. And even though the polished nickel has worn off in parts, we won't be replating it. I want it to look like the hardware has been here for generations.

I think this is even more satisfying than revealing the old wood

Stripping Wood Doors, Part 2

I can tell how irritating a current client project is when I find that I'd rather strip paint than work on a book layout. But, duty called, and I had to put off removing the Citristrip from the bathroom door, which is not really a bad thing, as the paint has been stubborn and an extra long soak will no doubt save me a little effort down the line. Twenty-four hours after initial application, I was ready.

When I first started stripping, not knowing any better, I used a metal scraping tool. This has the potential to gouge the wood, because the stripper softens the surface. I put many a nick in the bathroom trim until I found a Web site that recommended using plastic only. Since then, I've had no problems with making permanent dents.

As this is a bathroom door, it's probably always been painted. Eighty-five years later, and with the removal of six coats of paint, here it is. Well, a portion of it, anyway.

Of course, while most of this side of the door has been stripped, it's far from done. I now have the nasty task of getting the enamel paint--which is immune to the heat gun and resistant to the scrapers--out of all the nooks and crannies. I use a combination of toothpicks, a brass-bristle brush, tiny scrapers, tons of curses, and metal turkey lacers--the lacer has a curved end just the right size for running along the groove. It will take hours, whole evenings dedicated to the task, and as work-that-pays-the-bills seems to be getting in the way this week, it will be a few days before I update the results.

The dreaded enamel paint and the very bane of my existence.

As a total non sequitor, and because I like word origins, I had to look up the phrase "bane of my existence." Here's what I found:

"[B]ane" was once a very serious word. The Old English "bana" meant literally "slayer" in the sense we now use "killer" or "murderer." Early on, the English "bane" was also used in the more general sense of "cause of death," and by the 14th century "bane" was used in the specialized sense of "poison," a sense which lives on in the names of various poisonous plants such as "henbane" and "wolfbane."

From this very literal "something that kills you" usage, "bane" by the 16th century had broadened into its modern meaning of "something that makes life unpleasant, a curse."

So there you go, your word for the day, courtesy of the now-defunct "Google Answers" page.

Stripping Wood Doors, Part 1

I hate stripping paint.

It probably wouldn't be so bad if some previous owner didn't use peachy-flesh-colored enamel on everything. It's nearly impossible to pull up.

I blame this paint for me dragging my heals at attempting to strip any of the doors, but the time has come in our bathroom restoration for it to be done. This will be my first door project.

And so, for the next week or so, we'll be without a bathroom door as I work to remove the six layers of paint that coat it. Yes, six. I counted. We're using a folding screen as a door, designated shower times, and the honors' system that we won't peek to get us through the week.

So here we go. This is the door in question.

The hook, we discovered, is early plastic, but broken and painted over so is not worth saving. I hate the skinny towel bar, but because it's vintage, I can't throw it away. It goes into the storeroom on the shelf of vintage house parts that I don't plan on reusing, but won't pitch out.

Here's the doorknob.

The shiny nickel finish is wearing off on the knob, but we're going to keep this one. I like the idea of 85 years' worth of hands turning the knob. The plate looks like it's in pretty good shape (I removed some of the paint to take a peek). It's also polished nickel. The reverse side of the door has a glass knob, as do most of the doors in the house. The bottommost layer of paint, under five different layers of five different shades of white, is not, as it turns out, the dreaded fleshy peach, but yellow. Not a bad color, but we have no intention of repainting the door. It also turns out that it's about as difficult a paint to remove as the peach.

The first step was a $20 heat gun, set on high. It took about 2 1/2 hours to remove the bulk of the paint.

A closeup.

So now, as I type this, I have the entire side of the door coated in Citristrip. Of the strippers I've tried to date, I like how this one works; it doesn't give me a headache and if I accidentally splash it on my skin, it doesn't instantly burn. It's slow-acting, so I'll leave it for about 12 hours before attempting to see what's underneath.

Curious? Join me tomorrow to find out what we discover.

Behr Masonry and Concrete Stripper

We're going to turn the old coal room (one of two in the basement) into a summer bedroom (it's much cooler down here). This room is also Ted's office. We cleaned it up pretty well, and set up our 1930s bed against the far wall.

There's a nice view of the garden, too.

As with my office, this room is going to need a little help. We want to keep at least one foundation wall of the brick and concrete exposed, and not repaint it. The only problem is, it's been painted an ugly yellow on the top, and an even uglier green on the bottom. We also plan to tile this room, so the green chipping paint on the floor--yes, the floor was painted--needs to come up. We've tried numerous stripping products, including SoyGel and PeelAway, and nothing seems to work. It's frustrating, and has led to more than a few arguments spirited discussions on whether or not we should even leave the brick exposed at all.

At Home Depot this week, we spotted a product by Behr specially designed to strip masonry and concrete. What the heck, what's another $30? We decided to give it a try.

We slathered a test spot on the floor, on the concrete wall, and on the brick. We left it on for about an hour and a half, rewetting the surface once because it did dry out very fast. We then scrapped up the paint with a plastic scrapper, then took a wire brush and water to work it out of the grooves. It only took a few minutes at that point. Here's the floor:

And here's the concrete wall:

And here's the brick:

We're seriously impressed with how it cleaned the concrete; we should be able to further clean it and then use a terra cotta colored concrete stain. The brick was more difficult to scrape the paint from, and there's still quite a bit in the grooves. Maybe a second coat would help. If not, I'll take it back as far as we can, and dry brush a "white wash" look to it, so it will look kind of old worldish, but not yellow.

Overall, this is the best product we've come across for stripping paint from masonry and brick.

*In answer to a few e-mails I've received, my mom made the quilt on the bed for me and Ted. It's a double-wedding-ring pattern.

Kitchen Update -- Return to Green, and a New Take on Illumination

Ted and I went to Kansas City the day after Christmas, and brought his sister Betsy back to Chicago with us in time for New Year's Eve. It was a fun few weeks of visiting back and forth with friends and family, but now that the last of the hot buttered rum has been consumed and the Christmas decorations halfway packed up, it's time to get back to our home renovation projects.

So the last few days were spent working primarily on the kitchen and entryway, with triumphs great and small. Ted focused on the electrical, working to rewire the kitchen and find out just where the heck each circuit runs--the conduit never seems to go where we think it should, and it's a matter of opening up sockets, switches, and boxes to physically wiggle wires and trace where they go.

In the process, he removed what has been, for us, a true eyesore. The ugly white kitchen fan:

Our kitchen is fairly small, and the fan--even though it's a light color--just dominated the room. We love ceiling fans, but in this case it just wasn't working in the space. We cheerfully disassembled it, packed it up, and set it on the porch where it awaits my next trip to Goodwill. In its place is a light we picked up from Schoolhouse Electric, which makes period lighting. It's the one new light fixture we've purchased for The Box House; the others to date have all been antiques that Ted rewired. Definitely visit the vendor site; Schoolhouse has an excellent gallery where you can peruse the light fixtures in various settings. The one we selected has a gorgeous custard shade with black trim:

(I wish the light fixture budget was bigger, because I would also like to pick up a set of deco-looking bathroom sconces from Schoolhouse. Sigh. Maybe some day.)

As for myself, I continued to plug away at stripping the wood trim around the doors in the kitchen. When last we left it, it looked something like this, the wallpaper having just been taken down:

Note how the horizontal boards are painted white. Boring and so wrong! I used the heat gun on them, and because the first coat was shellac, it melted quickly and the white paint just slid off. For the wood without paint, I used a pull scraper and lightly scraped off the bubbling finish.

This photo shows the horizontal boards uncovered. Even without sanding them, I'm already thrilled with the contrast. It really makes the room come alive.

 
This is a closeup of the (mostly) sanded wood of the vertical trim around the door, and the horizontal board, which hasn't been sanded yet--you can still see traces of shellac.

I know y'all are tired of looking at my sanded wood, but I'm not, so here's another pic:

For her part, Mom began to chip off the gawd-awful brown tile that runs behind the sink and stove. Underneath the tile, we found evidence that the horizontal wood boards once ran all the way around the room. A previous owner took them out on this wall to install the icky tile.

 
Eventually, we're planning on painting this room with a pale green venetian plaster. It was Mom's idea, who just felt that the room should be light green. This color green, to be exact:

And what do you know? Upon removing the tile and a bit of the mortar, we found trace evidence that the original color of the kitchen was green:

Okay, it's not the same shade of green, but it's light green just the same. How cool is that?

All in all, it's been a satisfying few days' worth of work.

Why I Am Stripping Wallpaper on Christmas

You know how it goes. You begin stripping the paint off the bathroom door trim, and because it's only right, you strip the trim on both sides of the door at the same time. And as long as you're stripping the wood on the entryway side of the bathroom door, you decide to strip the trim on all six doors off the entryway at once.

And one of those doors leads into the kitchen. And the trim of this door is attached, at the corner of the room, to another door off the kitchen (this one opening to one of the bedrooms); so it gets stripped, too.

 Kitchen corner with entryway door at left, 

bedroom door at right.

So, as long as you're stripping the wood trim on that bedroom door, you might as well strip the wood trim on all the doors remaining on that stretch of wall—an ironing board closet, a pantry, and the back door.

And because each of these doors is surrounded by wallpaper, you decide to pull just enough of the wallpaper away from the edges of each to strip the wood.

But really, because it looks stupid partially torn and you've always hated the wallpaper anyway, you decide to push that part of your renovation project forward, and pull off all the fifty-year-old wallpaper the last owner put up.*

(Of course, you find it ever so slightly annoying to pull off a layer of wallpaper only to discover that there is another layer of the very same paper underneath. WTF?)

So this is how, fueled with too much ambition and hot buttered rum from an old family recipe, you end up stripping wallpaper on Christmas Eve.

But it definitely looks better than it did, and the rest of the wood stripping should be a piece o' cake.

The same corner of the kitchen where the entryway door 

and the bedroom door meet, sans wallpaper.

* In our case, because I am too cheap to rent a steamer and hesitant to use toxic wallpaper strippers, I just scored the paper with a PaperTiger, soaked paper towels in a mixture of equal parts hot water and white vinegar, laid out the sheets of paper towel on the wall, left them there for ten minutes or so, and then peeled the paper off. This worked well because the underlying paint is a semi-gloss.)

Cheap Heat Gun and a $3.95 Scraper -- The Best Wood Stripping Tools

These pictures are really for me more than you. As far as stripping projects go, it's not too impressive, so far. But if you knew how many environmental-friendly (and not-so-friendly) strippers I tried, without success, you'll understand how I nearly wept with joy to see the paint peel right off the bathroom trim with a $20 heat gun. The first four or five layers came right off. Look how thick the paint is.

The last layer--the brutal fleshy peach--comes off with the cheap-o scrapper I bought at Home Depot for $3.95. I'm irritated that I wasted money on The Silent Paint Remover, even if it was second hand. Back on Craigslist that unwieldy monster will go.

Of course, the process does stink to high heaven; the old paint contains lead and it's critical you wear a mask rated for lead and keep the windows open for continual ventilation when using a heat gun. And you have to be careful to move quickly and not scorch the wood. 




We're actually working on the entryway at the same time as the bathroom. When you enter our unit, you are greeted with five doors going off in various directions, six if you count the one you just came through. One of them is the bathroom. As long as I'm stripping the trim on the bathroom door, I'm doing it all. I don't know what some previous owner did to bugger it so badly, but this is what the trim looks like in the entryway (at least it's not painted).



Yup, every single door and frame is bubbly and peeling. (The upstairs unit, thank goodness, does not have the same problem.) We tried various means to fix it, from rubbing it with denatured alcohol to sanding it with a hand sander. The first method didn't really work, creating more of a sticky mess than anything, the second method was tedious and slow. So I tried the $3.95 scraper, and voila! Success.




So successful, that in about an hour I had managed to scrape about 20 feet of trim. The bubbly stuff comes right off, and I'll be able to sand and refinish with (relative) ease.



Of course, there are still still six door frames to do, seven if you count the middle arch.



And the doors themselves? That's next summer's problem. I mean project.

Stripping for the Tenants

I tried, honestly I did, to strip the sconces with an environmentally friendly product.

Truth be told, I hadn't even planned on stripping these quite yet. They belong in one of the bedrooms of the tenants' unit, and I thought they could wait.

But after seeing them against the freshly plastered blue wall, I couldn't stand how ugly they looked. It bothers me when people don't remove switch plates, socket covers, and the like when repainting. This is always the result: a fixture with three or four coats of thick paint on it. It was obvious these were lovely at one time, but the paint had obscured all the details.

And so, despite the fact that we have a to-do list as long as my arm, I threw one more project in the mix. I first tried to remove the paint with Franmar's SoyGel, a product I've had mixed results with. It did well on the first layer of off white, and the underlying rancid butter yellow. But then I came across the dreaded peach enamel.

At one time, everything in the house was painted a gawd-awful peach. Long ago, long before Crayola came out with its Multicultural Crayon set, they had a crayon named "flesh."

That's what color I'm talkin' about. Picture it on wood trim, on walls, on light fixtures, on the ceilings. Oh yeah, we've encountered it on everything. Everything I've attempted to strip in The Box House has a coat of this enamel hidden somewhere in the layers. And SoyGel can't cut through, not even if I leave it on way longer than required, not even when I place a sheet of plastic wrap on it and leave it sitting for days. It won't budge. And our Silent Paint Remover? That starts smoking almost immediately when it encounters this paint. I'm not sure what it is, but this paint's evil, and has nearly reduced me to tears many a time.

So for the sconces, I gave up and used the super-toxic-strip-through-anything stripper from Home Depot. And, thank heaven, it worked, because I'm dealing with a tight schedule for this project. But I do feel a little guilty.

The original finish was gold, but we decided silver would look better on the blue wall, so I drybrushed it with American Accents craft and hobby enamel. I'm fairly happy with the results, because all of the rich detail is still visible. If I had more time, I'd try to add a faux antique finish, but we need to get these back up on the wall ASAP.