Rehabber’s Rehab

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This weekend I finally finished the first in the great door reclaimation project, our bedroom door, which I’ve been working on since the Martin’s were here last.  All the doors are now down but the most important one (the bathroom of course).  All I can say is that doors are a lot bigger than the trim I’ve been stripping so far, and that there is a lot more of them than you think there is.  And they have two sides.  Ugh.  Far more time consuming than my previous projects.

Although it is just the two of us, in our house we are so close to your neighbors that you need the privacy a door can give you.  Especially since we have no blinds up since we’ve taken down all of the trim that you could hang them on.  We have one spot in our bedroom that you can stand in to get dressed in without being in the line of sight of either of our neighbors, and we’ve definitely gotten tired of sneaking around in our own house.

I started by removing all the hardware from the door and throwing it in a bucket, screws and all, since I didn’t want to lose any of it.  Then it was time to bring out the trusty ole’ heat gun and to strip the paint off the flat outside and inside portion of the panels on the side of the door that faced into the bedroom.  I got this done in about two sittings (or hunchings). The edges of the panels took considerably longer.  I couldn’t really go at it with the metal scraper because it was too easy to dig into and gouge the door.  I finally found a use for all those chemical strippers on this part of the door, and they worked pretty well at getting a bulk of the paint off.  I still can’t stand the smell and it is much messier compared to the heat gun, but seems to be quicker and less damaging to the door.  After getting most of the paint off with the chemical strippers, I went over it scraping with a small screw driver the spots of paint that were still left, and using the Dremmel in some places. (more…)

Thursday

On my lunch break I took a trip to Costco to stock up for the soon arriving horde (the Martin’s, Matt, my Dad and Granddad), the main essentials being snacks (dips, crackers), bottled water (even though the tap water in Chicago is very good), and most importantly Gatorade. Gotta keep the workers happy, otherwise they are running out every five minutes to pick this stuff up. After work it was off to the paint store. Thor and I were determined not to repeat our earlier mistake of just buying paint and putting it up, so we bought about 7 samples of paint for the living room. It’s actually pretty nice that our Benjamin Moore store sells tiny samples that you can put up and try out for only about 3 dollars. I wanted blues, he wanted greens, and we wanted to paint one wall a neutral color. I figured we’d put them up and duke it out. (more…)

When we got back from our rafting trip in Pennsylvania this Labor Day weekend, we returned to our half painted office and all disorganized house.

There seems to be a strange phenomenon in the house that as you work in the evenings, instead of cooling down the house gets hotter.  Maybe the stucco house releases heat stored up in the day as the evening goes on.  By the end of the evening I felt like I had spent an hour sweating it out at a bad spa and we finished putting up the paint on the walls of the office.  We painted the office “spinning wheel” by dutch boy, and decided not to change the color any (we were debating making it lighter), and are in retrospect both pretty happy with the results.  I’m leaving the trim white.

The office is not part of the great trim reclaiming project since if we do decide to add on a second story, this room is currently the top contender for where the stairs will go.  No point is doing a lot of work on it when it might all just be ripped out.  Plus it will be nice to have at least one room that is done.

Still to do: touch up the trim, paint the pink closet white and put up a curtain over the closet.

After the cleaning spree of the past few days and with a friend coming into town this weekend, we are considering spending our first night in the house in the next couple of days. But first, we needed to set the furniture up, leading us on the first steps of layout and deciding how we want the rooms to look.

living room with couches and a bed thrown in

back bedroom with guest bed and room for side tables

(more…)

I have two words for you: Heat Gun.

I fell in love with this device about 5 seconds after using it when the paint began to bubble and peel off immediately.  My previous experiences working with chemical strippers left me frustrated and with unattractive results. 

Perhaps they are more effective if you are not attempting to remove 10 layers of paint at once. After a couple of hours of layering on the stripper, waiting for it to work, scraping off some of the paint and then repeating this process again and again, only to be left with wood that looked uneven and splotchy, I was considering giving up and giving in and just paint it all.  I decided to try another chemical that is supposed to remove 7 layers of paint (right up my alley) and be stronger than the others.  I would say it was even less effective than the others.

I thought I’d give it one last try with the heat gun, and after about 5 minutes of fiddling with it to get the hang of it, I was removing paint in long strips leaving a clean board behind. So, here is my how to strip paint with the heat gun: (more…)