Working the wood

There was a bit of getting up to date in the last post. But what have we been doing towards this progress? The answer is various things, but beyond the fire fighting, material buying, and suffocating in the heat, one effort in particular has been an omni-permanent saga.

You may remember our res-dooration efforts from an end of May post. They remain ongoing. However, the bigger problem is the doors are only half the battle. Even once the doors are stripped, the frames remain. And while smaller in surface area, they are infinitely more detailed with mouldings and grooves, making them painful to strip. Our efforts in any spare time we've had during the last couple of weeks have focused on this.

How have we done this? With a product called peelaway. It's a long process but it works.

First stage is to apply this a thick layer of peelaway paste, with a paintbrush.

Getting in the groove! That's the key.

Paste applied, the next stage is to cover it up with a special paper and leave it to fester.

"I'm closed. Come and see me tomorrow."

About 24 hours later, we're back to peel off the paper, paste and hopefully some paint with a plastic spatula.

yum yum.

.. leaving a bit of a mess.

If you think this looks a mess, you should see the buckets of water after we wash it down!

A few buckets of water, sponges, brillo pads and lots of elbow grease later, and we get to this, more or less.

Looking good! But we still need to apply an alkaline neutralizer (as it's a bit acidic).

A quick run over the few remaining big blobs; and sanding - sometimes more, sometimes less - is still needed to finish it off. But already it's looking a lot better with a century of paint off.

Sounds easy right? Problem with so many frames is doing it again and again.... and then there's still the staircase and its hundreds of spindles!

Oh, all those half stripped spindles. And a hint as to what we'll see in the next post.