HG Openhouse Blog

My husband and I are in the process of renovating a small studio in one of Boston’s historic old buildings.

You could blame it on the beautifully stained wood  in the main lobby, or blame it on a genetic predisposition to take on large, unwieldy projects without first counting the cost, but whatever possessed me I decided quite suddenly one day that I would strip all the old paint off the woodwork in our studio.

So what if the building is 100 years old and has at least 50 layers of paint?  So what if every contractor man to pass through the door said it would be faster/cheaper to replace the wood?  So what if the strongest stripper known to mankind barely made a dent in the surface?  So what if the “in” thing is white woodwork?  I was determined that I would restore this beautiful old oak to its former glory and so began my life as a part-time stripper.

I started February 11th with the intent on surprising my husband on Valentine’s day with the finished product.  Okay, anyone out  there who has ever taken on this job is laughing so hard right now you can’t stay upright. But if you have never stripped paint before you are probably nodding your head that 3 days seems a reasonable expectation for getting the job done.

There were, after all, only 5 doors (front and back) and  10 door frames with side grooved panels and overhead dentil molding and a large (very large) framed window.  Oh, and of course the several hundred feet of baseboard.  Should be a breeze, right?  Paste and cover with paper on day one (just like painting really)   peel away the paper with the paint on day two, wash it all down on day three.  Right?

Wrong.  The ONLY time the paint came off all in one peel was when I got to the inside of the closet door. Apparently it had escaped many a coat of paint and therefore I was able to take it down in one go — proving to myself that had this been a younger home, my 3 day plan just might have had a fighting chance.  Most of the rest of the wood has required anywhere from 2 to 6 coats of stripper with scraping in-between.

At the start I thought how silly to pay all that money for a professional paint stripper when you could do it yourself for free.  Somewhere in the middle (might have been mid-April)  I would have paid anyone  five times that amount to just make the paint go away.

In the end it’s hard to know how much money I really saved by doing the job myself. At $63.00 a pail for the environmentally- friendly stripper plus the cans of denatured alcohol to wash away the residue, the gloves, the scrapers, the plastic to put down on the floor, the tape, the ….well, you get the idea.   And then you have my labor — hours and hours and hours of  finger-breaking, wrist-aching labor.

So here it is, four months and probably a dozen buckets of stripper later and I’m just finishing up the final few pieces of molding.  I’ve learned a few things along the way.

First, don’t fuss too much on the first coat let the product do the work for you. (I used Peel Away 7)

Second,use the right scraping tools for each different style of molding.  This makes a huge difference.

Third, be prepared for the inevitable — some of the wood had been skim coated with a shellac or a bonding agent of some sort and  it took some extra work to get that stuff off.

Fourth, make sure you have a strong muscle and a little steel wool/Brillo pad to wash the wood clean (thanks to my dear husband for making my wood look so good in the end and for being a good shoulder to cry on).

Fifth, expect to be referred to as “my friend the stripper” in public.  Folks find this highly amusing.

Sixth, know when to call it quits.  We’ll be having it professionally stained (I’ve learned my lesson).

But today, looking at the before and after pictures of the front door even before it’s stained I’m feeling just a little sense of pride in sticking with it — after all, that wood is 100 years old and in my mind, well worth revealing!   What do you think?