Our New Old House

This weekend was the second meeting of the Des Moines Rehabbers Club. I was thrilled to see so many repeat faces, and even more excited to meet some new people this time around. Steve Wilke-Shapiro already posted pictures of the event on RenovateDSM.com, so I’ll show you some pictures I took of some fascinating plumbing fixtures in this late 1800s house. Some of them are very old and some are new but have a classic character.

This toilet was in the third floor bathroom off what is known as the “ballroom.” Most people would call it an attic, but rumor has it the original owners of the house actually used it to host dances or something. Notice the carved pattern around the rim of the toilet. Talk about art in unseen places!

This sink is also in the third floor bathroom and seems to have new faucets but the original drain handle. Notice it says “pull” on top of the handle. How quaint!

And finally, this clawfoot tub has a really cool retrofitted faucet with a spray nozzle attachment. I covet it so!

This house has made me excited to find a Victorian era house to rehab next!

So, if we remember back to my last post about stripping, we left off with the door looking like this:

I had used the heat gun on the paint on one side. This weekend I applied a coat of CitriStrip and let that sit for about 3 hours. Here’s the door with CitriStrip on it:

Ok, it ocurrs to me now that you can’t really see much difference between the first and the second photo. Whatever. Stick with me, people.

So, when I started scraping off the CitriStrip it looked all brown and clumpy and generally nasty, like this:

And it appears I didn’t do a thorough enough job with the heat gun the first time around. There’s still too much paint left after the CitriStrip. But this is a learning experiement! So, what have we learned? I learned that the CitriStrip does a fantastic job getting off the leftover old varnish, leaving the beautiful stain of the wood intact. After I wiped off the excess CitriStrip with mineral spirits and generally wiped down the whole door, here’s what it looked like:

I still have some clean-up work to do on this side, but it’s on its way to looking beautiful again! I flipped the door over to let that side dry while I started heat gunning the other side. Now that I have the hang of the heat gun I’m able to be more careful about getting all the paint off, and I’m also finding it easier to remove the paint from the carved trim edges with the heat gun than with CitriStrip. Fortunately, the paint on the other side of the door isn’t in as many layers and the top layer holds together in one big sheet of latex, so it’s coming off really well. Pictures of side B coming soon.

(As happens with so many singles, the B side of this release will end up being a bigger hit than the A side. But I’ll be in good company. Unchained Melody, I Will Survive, and Maggie May were all B sides. And now you can say you learned something today too!)

I got my heat gun! Now when I say, “Leave me alone or I’ll melt your face off!” I can really mean it. 950 degrees Fahrenheit, baby! Yeah!

I’ve got two old doors that were in the basement when we moved in. They were originally the kitchen and the hallway doors. Someone in the past took them off and stashed them downstairs, but not before painting them with horrible layers of paint. Since I don’t plan on putting these doors back up, I decided to learn how to strip paint on them. No huge loss if I screwed something up.

(For the peace of mind of Brandon’s family, who read this blog, I’d just like to point out that Brandon was only in the room without a respirator to take the first few pictures. He hardly breathed any noxious chemical fumes at all. I took the rest of the photos myself.)

 Edit: I realized this morning that I forgot to post the last picture I took last night, of the one side of the door finished.  Here it is:

Thanks again to Nate and everybody else who recommended the heat gun for stripping paint. I’m totally hooked!