Our New Old House

This weekend my college friend, Chantell came to visit. She’s from Chicago and is going to grad school at Syracuse. She took the train all the way from Syracuse to Chicago for the holidays, and took the train from Chicago to here for a weekend visit. As soon as we made plans for her to come, she asked me, “Do I get to help work on the house?” Clearly, she had no idea what she was getting herself into! But Chantell’s a good sport and is one of those crazy people (like me) who can find fun in even the most mundane and tedious tasks, so we put on the radio, sang some crazy songs, and got some work done around the house.

First she finished up the last bit of scraping wallpaper in the front bedroom:

While she did that I helped Brandon take the air conditioner out of our bedroom window. (More on that in a little bit.) Next I helped Chantell scrub the walls to get the last of the wallpaper residue off and get them clean and prepped for plaster patching. There aren’t any pictures of me helping with this part, but I was there! She’ll vouch for me.

Look what a difference washing the wall made! The paint almost looks nice enough to leave alone! The spot in the middle has been scrubbed.

In this picture, the left wall has been scrubbed, the right wall has not. Like you needed me to tell you that anyway.

While Chantell and I were scrubbing, Brandon took the closet door off its hinges and took all the hardware off the woodwork so I can start stripping the paint. Apparently, when the previous owners put up a new style of curtains, they never removed the old hardware, just added more and more brackets, hooks, and screws as they went. So here’s the bag full of hardware he took off two windows:

Some of the brackets had been painted over multiple times. Here’s Brandon’s screwdriver and putty knife stuck behind one bracket:

He also took the register off the heat duct and removed the hardware from the door so I could put them into ammonia and soak the paint off.

When the previous owners were getting ready to put up the wallpaper, someone scratched some math problems on the wall in pencil.

Like I said before, Brandon and I also took the air conditioner out of our bedroom window. This project was a BEAST! First of all, the thing had been there for like 20 years. It weighs a ton. It leaked condensation all over the window sill, causing water damage to the wood and the plaster below. That will have to be repaired later. Our first challenge was undoing all the crappy insulating they had done all those years ago.

Brandon popped the front cover off so he could get a better grip. What a mess!

After wiggling it around a bit, we figured out it had to go out and not in, so we let go from the inside and let it sag dangerously off the side of the house.

There are no pictures of the next few steps because it took all three of us to get underneath it and haul it down to the ground. I’ll admit, we dropped it the last foot or so. I brought up the dolly and hauled it to the curb.

 We closed the storm window and I cleaned up the inside of the window as best I could.  The paint is all flaking off and the accumulation of dead bugs and cobwebs was disgusting.  But our bedroom is now just a little bit more insulated from the cold.

 Since it was really nice outside on Saturday I took the opportunity to spread some mulch around the back door to cover up the mud back there until we can get a new concrete slab poured.  While Brandon and I were working on that we found the coolest spider underneath a bag of mulch!   

It’s called a Woodlouse Hunter Spider and it only eats what are known around here as “roly-polies.” (They’re known in other places as woodlice, pillbugs, or armadillo bugs.) It’s perfectly harmless to humans, but sure doesn’t look harmless! I looked it up to be sure. I learned a lot about woodlice too! They live in damp places in the dirt and eat decaying plants and wood. You’ll find them under logs, in wood piles, and in this case, under bags of cedar mulch. They are also harmless to humans, but can indicate a dampness problem if they’re found near the foundation of your house. Like earthworms, they help enrich the soil.

EDIT: A kindly reader named Ron informed me that Woodlouse spiders are in fact dangerous sometimes because they are aggressive.  They’ll bite and the bite can be painful and nasty and all sorts of terrible things!  So don’t mess with them.  Thanks Ron!

Ok, moving on from backyard biology…

After we went down the street to Grandma’s and had a Mexican meal that couldn’t be beat, we came back home and I taught Chantell how to use the heat gun.

First, I made sure she was protected from the lead paint fumes.  That meant fitting, adjusting, and testing the respirator.  Hilarity ensued.

Then we got down to the serious business of stripping paint. Here Chantell waits eagerly while I plug in the heat gun.

Chantell listened carefully to instructions.

And watched me demonstrate.

Then I turned her loose!

She almost finished the whole door!

We did have some time to relax this weekend too. The cats got the whole futon to themselves while we were working.

Scratch didn’t mind sharing though.

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!

I have been wanting to get a heat gun and start stripping the woodwork in our house.  Several people have said that I HAVE to get a respirator mask if I’m going to do that, so I went shopping around on Ebay today and here’s what I ended up buying:

 A 1500W 2 Speed Motor Heat Gun w/4 PC kit from Proline Products.  (Here’s the Ebay listing: 1500W 2 Speed Motor Heat Gun w/4 PC kit.)  I got it for $6, plus $15 shipping. 

 And an AO Safety Respirator.  (Here’s the Ebay listing: AO Safety Respirator.)  This cost $21.01 plus $7 shipping.

Here’s the picture from the Ebay listing:

All for a grand total of $49.01!!! 

I’m going to set up a work area in the basement for stripping the removable things like doors and windows (though I WON’T be using the heat gun on the windows for fear of cracking the glass!) 

Here’s a brief glimpse into my day:

Me: I stripped paint today!

My friend Brian: Who is paint and why did he/she let you strip him/her?

Have I mentioned I love my friends?

But back to the point, I did strip paint today. I bought a bottle of Citri-Strip months ago, but I’ve never stripped paint before. I decided to try working on the windows outside because it’s October now and soon it will be too cold to work on the outside projects. Unfortunately, by the time I gathered all my supplies and got the ladder level enough to work on, the sun was going down. But I just wanted to see how the stuff worked so I applied some to a side window and waited the 30 minutes recommended on the bottle. 30 minutes wasn’t enough to really get a full layer of paint off, so I did a larger area and waited an hour. That took off quite a bit more. Here are pictures:

My test area ended up kinda big for a test area, but what’s the worst that could happen? It’s already paint I want to remove.

Safety first, people!

The directions on the bottle recommend a scraper like this:

But I had more luck with a razor blade scraper that I made sure had been dulled on a previous project so it wouldn’t gouge the wood. I wouldn’t recommend this for anything delicate, but on this straight, solid piece of seasoned wood with at least four thick layers of paint, it was a real time saver.

After an hour it looked kind of bubbly and shriveled.

So I started scraping.

It took off one good solid layer of paint, but that’s all. Incidentally, the wood trim on my house used to be slate blue, kinda nice!

It got dark and I had to pack up and go inside, so I thought I’d see how the chemical stripper worked on interior paint. Rather than just test some random spot, I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and take care of a problem we’d been having ever since we moved in.

Our bathroom door has been painted with so many layers of goopy paint that it will no longer close. I truly believe that the lady living here before us never really closed her bathroom door because she lived alone. We have two VERY nosy cats, however, who just can’t wait their turn, so a properly closing bathroom door is a MUST.

I applied a layer to the inside edge of the door:

And the doorway:

This was interior latex paint, so 30 minutes was plenty of time for it to work:

Again, the plastic scraper wasn’t quite satisfactory.

The razor blade worked much better.

See???

After I’d taken two layers off, I used a coarse scouring pad to dig out the corners and scrape the edges clean.

Then I used a rag with mineral spirits and wiped down all the surfaces I’d scraped. I didn’t go all the way down to the bare wood because after I took two layers of paint off, the bathroom door was able to close! It was getting late so I called that a step in the right direction.

Brandon knows someone who’s going to loan us a heat gun to try taking some of the paint off. There are so many layers of paint on everything here that if the heat gun works, I’ll probably use it on the first couple layers and then use chemical stripper to get the rest really clean.

One final note:
The Citri-Strip claims to be a lot more friendly to the user because it doesn’t give off the harsh fumes that other paint strippers do. In fact, it has a really pleasant citrus scent. Don’t let that fool you, though! It still gives off fumes that can be dangerous when it’s used indoors. I didn’t even realize I wasn’t getting enough ventilation until I started feeling lightheaded when I was working on the bathroom. I opened a window and everything was fine, but it definitely snuck up on me.

But I did learn that I really enjoy stripping and I do plan to spend a lot more time doing it!

From the fun and frivolity of shower curtains and wallpaper sheep I must change the topic to long lost built-in cabinets that have disappeared.

Excuse me while I vent for a moment: MY HOUSE USED TO HAVE BUILT-IN CABINETS AND A BUFFET AND WHY DID SOMEBODY TEAR THEM OUT? WHY? WHY?!!!

My grandmother spent all last week scraping wallpaper in the living room and dining room and she uncovered evidence of what I long suspected must have been there: a built-in buffet in the dining room and a wooden frame on the doorway between the living room and dining room. Here are the pictures of what she uncovered:

Now I’m going to ask you to use your imagination for a moment. Imagine that this picture doesn’t have all my random stuff cluttering up. Imagine that the woodwork is a beautiful rich dark walnut or cherry. And now imagine that there’s a lovely gorgeous buffet graciously spread out below the window, with a wall sconce on either side of the window, and leaded glass on the front doors! Can you see it? I can, and it breaks my heart.

Did it bring a tear to your eye and a lump to your throat? It did mine. *sniff* Somebody hold me.

Now on to the tragedy that was once a warm, natural transition between rooms and is now just… a hole. Look closely at the edges of the wall separating the living room from the dining room and you’ll see the faint outline of what used to be woodwork, ripped savagely apart for the sake of… well I don’t know what.

What the heck is wrong with people? I mean seriously. Why take down perfectly good woodwork? What’s the point? I have resorted to inventing a crazy story to make myself give these people the benefit of the doubt, telling myself that based on the layers of wallpaper and when they date from that the built in buffet had been gone a very long time; perhaps someone sold them to feed their family during the Depression. I don’t know. When I can figure out who the people were who owned the house before Mrs. Riley, I may find more answers. But for now, I’m stuck staring at the walls that bear the ghosts of cabinets past.

Less drama in my next post, I promise!