My house was built in 1926 which makes it - well, past its prime. No longer can you just put on some new paint to cover over the ravages of age. This was made painfully obvious by the previous owner(s) who tried to do just that. Our Realtor, who is also a good friend was circumspect about us buying the house in the first place, because of all the paint on all the trim.
The house is full of trim and molding from floor to ceiling. And all of it was caked, (literally caked) with layers and layers of paint. It was to the point in some areas where you could not even make out the detail of the piece of trim. Corners resembled more like acutely angled arches. There were drips everywhere. The good news is that much of the original wood is unpainted and gorgeous, so it's not all bad. I'd attach some pictures, but Em has them all on her computer and she is in Chicago.
This is why it took us the better part of 8 months to strip and paint one room. Sure, it's a big room but some people can't imagine why it took 8 months. All I can say is, you go one inch at a time with a heat gun and various sharp implements pulling off strips of paint in many layers each with varying properties.
For instance, one layer would come right off like a big piece of dead skin, (sorry for that simile, but it's apt), whereas the next layer would simply turn to muck and need to be worked very slowly and deftly. This of course is due to the differences in paint over the years. The original lead based oil paints simply don't want to come off. And it is pretty apparent that the modern paints over it were not applied sans primer.
The faces of the walls themselves were in no better shape. Clearly there was wallpaper at one point over the original (forest green!) paint, over which someone decided to paint. And so with heat and scraping and not a little swearing, it all came off, too. After that, the walls were sanded and the plaster fared to as smooth as I could make it. Then it was all primed and painted properly.
God, I just went back and read the last few paragraphs. Sorry. If you think reading about it is boring (it is) try doing it (no, don't!). What brings this up is that I am now taking all the paint off the door casings upstairs and I am reliving the horror all over again. I started this endeavor immediately after finishing the other painting and then just ignored it for a year leaving them in situ. However, there is only so much sitting around I can do and I have been doing a lot of it the last two weeks, so it was time to make some progress.
I have done a couple hours a couple days over my hiatus. Today was the third two-hour session. It is terribly difficult work. It is terribly boring work. I have to wear an elbow brace and a wrist brace to keep my carpal tunnel down to a dull roar, (a condition which not incidentally became exacerbated during the initial scraping/painting job). The job is mad no easier by the fact I have limited motion and the paint chips seem to have a malevolent sentience in as much as they seek out the space between my arm braces and my skin. Add the paint chips and the sweat and the chaffing is nearly unbearable for more than a couple hours; even though I put on powder before hand.
It is notable that after two hours of labor, I can see that despite the piles of paint chips and dust that now live on the floor instead of on the trim you can note exactly zero progress. As soon as I get done I see whole sections of my work area that I simply did not get to. It is frustrating. No matter how many times I try to coax myself to stay in one area and move on only when it is done completely, I can't. I will step outside my mind for a time and whence I return, I am surprised to find myself scraping in a whole different area, starting something new when the area I just left is patently undone.
This short attention span is my bane. I suppose I would have been diagnosed as ADD as a child if my parents hadn't been more patient. It is amazing to think that with different parents (as an adoptee it is not out of the realm of possibilitly) I could have been drugged just for being a little flighty and precocious. Thankfully my parents simply tried their best to keep me in some sort of envelope. It was a big envelope.
I digress - see how easy it is for me to get off topic? I just had to go back an re-read the last paragraphs to remember where I was going with this. The point is that these maintenance jobs are a labor of love. And in order to do something right and be proud of it, you just have to suck it up and do it. So what if I don't get it done all during my hiatus from work? I also did taxes (which was preferable to scraping paint just to frame it another way) and got a lot of other things done, too. The time hasn't been wholly unproductive.
When the door casings are prepped, I will pull the doors themselves. I hope to have them "dipped" so I don't have to put a bunch of labor into pulling the paint off them. Under the paint is some sort of finish which will have to be sanded right through to the wood. It would be much better to have a professional dip strip them so I can go about the work or making doors open and close the right way in openings that long ago lost any semblance of being square, level and plumb. We bought some period correct bone white porcelain door knobs on this past summer's trip to Pennsylvania to trim them all out nicely.
Once that's all done, we can prime and paint which is so easy compared to all the work it takes to get there. And it will look great. So great, we will be able to more easily spot all the problems in the bedrooms; namely the painted over wallpaper, the popcorn ceilings, the paint glommed trim and the ill fitting doors. Sound familiar?
It's a good thing we opted for the 30 year mortgage. It is going to take at least that long to get it how we want it. This disregards the dyer need to restore all the wood casement windows (it took me all summer to do one, poorly, and there are 15 more to do) finish the basement (complete with new plumbing and wiring) and build a new garage and pour a new driveway. The latter couple items so expensive and time intensive I can't even wrap my mind around them.
I need to get back to work, this being unemployed is going to kill me.
No comments:
Post a Comment