Our New Old House

I don’t have any exciting dramatic pictures of progress to show off this week, but I did spend some time moving things along in my refinishing workshop. Let’s take a tour!

This room in my basement is where I do all the wood refinishing projects that aren’t stuck to the wall. Currently I’ve got a door propped up on sawhorses soaking in Citri-Strip, a table for heat gunning paint off the trim pieces for the windows, and a table for Citri-Stripping other trim pieces. You can see a door propped up on the right that’s been refinished — I just have to put the hardware back on it and hang it back in its doorway — and a stack of windows from the front bedroom waiting to be reglazed, stripped, and refinished.

Closeup of the trim pieces ready for Citri-stripping:

So that’s my little workshop! Hopefully I’ll have some nice progress pictures for you soon.

When we left off last time, our living room and dining room looked like this:

On Saturday, it looked like this!

Actually, that picture is from after I’d cleaned up after the party a bit. But you get the idea.

Friday night Brandon put up the last of the wallpaper border in the dining room.

I’m very pleased with how it came out.

On Saturday morning he put the attic door back on with freshly painted hardware.  (I still have a little more clean-up work to do on that door, but it looked pretty nice having it back up.)

On Saturday night Our New Old House was full of friends and laughter. We finished all the projects on our list in the knick of time and it was a wonderful party.

We’re so grateful for everybody who came and celebrated with us! Our house is so much warmer with friends to share it with.

Here’s where we were on Tuesday night. Party’s on Saturday. Can we do it?

I think we can.

We’ve made some good progress on the dining room. Here’s how the dining room windows looked mid-chemical strip:

And with chemical stripping done, waiting for wood filler to dry so I can sand it.

The rest of the woodwork in the dining room is coming along nicely. I finished stripping one side of this door.

And the rest of the woodwork on the doorways:

Here’s the kitchen doorway mid-chemical strip:

Brandon took off the door so I could get the rest of this doorway stripped. It’s pretty much done now except for some minor clean up of putty between the pieces.

And the kitchen doorway very close to finished:

In the living room we still had a section of wall that needed priming.

So Brandon primed it.

Also, I heat stripped the paint off the window frame and baseboards on that side.

There are still sections of the floor that need to have the carpet padding scraped off so I’ve been finishing that job this week.

Finally, in preparation for the party, I made a batch of cookies. Ok, really this batch was just to motivate myself to keep working. Well, ok it was to bribe myself to keep working. Whatever. Cookies rock.

Last night I painted the whole living room with the same bone white that is in the dining room. I was only able to do one coat, but it’s a huge improvement from the stark white primer. Tonight I’m going to finish scraping the dining room floor (finished the living room floor on Tuesday,) do a couple of touch ups on the wood work, and possibly heat strip the woodwork around the living room front door and front windows. Brandon started putting up the wallpaper border in the dining room last night and we’ll finish that tonight. Then Friday will be for arranging furniture and cleaning up.

Phew! There’s nothing like marathon house fixing!

The paint’s all up and I’m working on stripping the paint off the woodwork in the dining room!

Pictures!

Oh yeah, and I accidentally touched the metal tip of the heat gun to my arm as I was reaching for the paint chip bucket. I burned my arm, but it will be fine.

More to come! Come back soon!

This weekend I stripped another door.

Today I put another coat of polyurethane on the test door. It’s looking so cool!

Then I worked the rest of the night on the front bedroom. No pictures yet because darn it, after all that work it doesn’t look like I did much. But I kept heat gunning the paint off the window frames and baseboards, then I applied Citristrip to the front window frames to take off what was left of the paint and the excess varnish. It needs another round.

It feels like I’m getting nowhere right now, but I’m sure I’ll feel better in the morning. My arm’s just sore from all that scraping.

[tags]varnish, woodwork, heat gun, Citristrip, paint removal[/tags]