Wow! New work!
After the work I did about a week and a half ago, Jenny got really excited, and we decided to push forward to see how much work we could get done. Last weekend, we cleaned-out a lot of the debris that had accumulated in the room, and I started to work on more wallpaper. I finally got the last of the wall-mounted track to support the ceiling down, and with it the top few layers of wallpaper near the ceiling. I also started to clear-off the parts of the ceiling that were loose, and tore down a crappy, poorly-built box around two of the heating ducts that go upstairs. While I was working on that, Jenny was starting the first pass at cleaning the remaining adhesive residue off of the wall with the stripping solution, a plastic scraper, and a paper towel (lots of paper towels, actually–this is a messy part of the job). All of this work left only one major bit of wallpaper left to do on the room.
This week, we worked for two days (so far) on the room. Jenny continued to work around the room on the walls that I had already stripped, doing the first pass of cleaning. I worked on getting the last of the major wallpaper done, which I was finally successful at completing Wednesday evening. Now, the only stripping left to do are in some of the tough-to-reach areas, but they are all small (above the big window, above the pocket doors, and above the door to the entrance hall). Jenny is going to work on cleaning the rest of the walls, then we’re probably both going to get involved with the second cleaning pass (abrasive pads, sponges, and more scrubbing).
Once the walls are clean and the last of the wallpaper scraping is finished (including scraping any other ceiling parts), I’m going to start stripping paint from the woodwork. This is going to take a little while, but I think it’ll be well worth the effort. Once the major stripping effort is done, we’ll carefully sand-away any left-over paint or old finish, then re-finish. It looks like the existing finish is shellac, so we might just do that again. There are lots of debates there, so we’ll have to see. Any thoughts?
There’s lots to do in the next week. We’re getting ready for vacation, and I have almost three days set aside for us to work on the room. I hope that we’ll get some useful stuff done. The amount of work done in the summer, though, is pretty much inversely proportional to how hot and humid it is outside–the hotter it is, the less we can do effectively. We’ll see when we get there. I’d love to be started on paint stripping during at least one of those days.
That’s it. Later.
jonathan
