Newborn House Restoration

Before and After Above: Doors before stripping. Right: Doors after stripping and refinishing. Click image to see large version.

For the past few weeks, Andi has been involved in a tedious, time-consuming, wearying, exhausting, finger-numbing process stripping the many layers of paint from all of the workwork in the parlor. All of the workwork in the house is made of heart pine, which was probably milled from local timber more than 120 years ago. The wood is tightly grained heart pine that just isn’t available today.

In the parlor, we have two pocket doors that are more than 10 feet tall. Each door includes six panels, each of which is made from a single board approximately 18 inches wide. When we bought the house, all of the workwoord was painted … and much of it had been painted multiple times.

To accentuate the beauty of the woodwork, we decided to strip all of the painting in the parlor, including the baseboard trim, window trim, French doors and trim, pocket doors and trim, and the mantle. To say the least, it was a major undertaking.

To get there, Andi went through a painstaking series of steps:

1. Strip the top layers of paint with the Eco-Stripper.
2. Using a chemical stripper and paint scrapers, remove the next layer of paint.
3. Using a series of ever-smaller tools (paint scraper, razor blade, pecan picker, etc.) remove the next layers of paint.
4. Sand the wood with a random-orbit sander.
5. Sand the wood with a mouse sander.
6. Hand sand the wood.
7. Steel wool.

It was tedious and time-consuming. In the end, though, we think it will be worth the effort. We are now in the process of putting a polyurethane finish on the woodwork. After that, we’ll start with the painting, which we hope will be largely finished by this weekend.

In addition to the paint stripping, work in the parlor included a complete rewiring of all of the electrical work, including wiring the room for cable and network.

In my next update (very soon, I hope), I’ll update you on some of the progress on the exterior work, plus a roundup of our six month’s progress and a story about the barn plans.

Stay tuned.