Mmmm.. the smell of stripper in the air
We needed some sleep this morning, so we slept-in a bit. We were up and moving by 10AM, though. The first job for today was to get the one chair from the room and move it “someplace else.” That someplace else ended up being the front porch for the moment, but that’s fine–I posted both of those swivel rockers on Pittsburgh freecycle, so hopefully they’ll wander away soon. They are still in pretty good shape, but we just have too much furniture. The plan all along was for these to disappear when we moved our “new” furniture into the living room, so now seems like a good time to get them gone. We didn’t have room for both chairs in our temporary living space, so one of them had to stay in the room. It was getting to be a pain working around it, so out the door it went.
Next was some general clean-up in the room. Jenny had been working in there a few times over this week while I’ve been doing the show, but I never really did a good clean-up after we got the front window reinstalled. This was a good time to do that.
Next was putting the carpet back down around the perimeter of the room. What’s that, you say? Why did we do that? Well, we plan to get rid of the carpet when we’re done anyway, so we might as well save some money and use it as our drop-cloth and floor protector while paint stripping and painting. The plan is to get working on the chemical stripper all over the place now, so it was a good time to get the drop cloth (read: carpet) back in place. There are a few places where it doesn’t reach, but I’m not too worried about that right now. Those places are where the heat registers go, etc., so they’re going to be covered again soon anyway.
After all that was finished, I noticed that there was a small area of the window sill for the smaller window that we had not stripped yet with the heat gun. We use the smaller window to contain our fan, so this is the area where the fan normally sits. It was a pretty small area, so I opened the window a bit to get some airflow, and fired-up my heat gun. Most of that stripped off pretty easily. Then, I got to work applying the stripper (Strypeeze, for those who are wondering) to the frame and trim of that window. That took a while to get slathered appropriately. I took a break for about ten minutes after that, then came back and started cleaning off the stripper in the order that I had applied it. This stuff works like gangbusters, and the wood cleaned-up pretty well. There are a few crevices that are being a pain in the rear, but I don’t know how much effort I’m going to expend on those. I can’t see them on the big window anymore, so they seem to disappear pretty well. I’m trying to do this window well so that we don’t go through so much sandpaper when sanding time comes (which should be tomorrow for this window, actually!). I also own a set of hand scrapers of various sizes and curves, and I think I might try to use them to do some of the work prior to sanding. I use them for woodworking projects, and they leave a surface much nicer and with less dust than sandpaper. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get all the tiny curves and stuff with them, though, so we’ll have to see.
Speaking of sanders, the Craftsman ROS developed some issues that I noticed when I was finishing the big window last weekend. Specifically, when not in contact with a surface, the sanding pad starts to spin at high speed. If the pad is brought back in contact with wood at this point, it generates a giant dish-out and circular marks, which is not cool. Using my jeans to slow the pad before bringing it back to wood works, but is far from ideal. I need to call Craftsman about that. It’s my Dad’s sander, though, so I should probably get my own for projects here. I think I’m going to pick up a 1/4 sheet “finish” sander. These sanders can be used with any type of paper, really, to make them as aggressive as one wants them to be. They excel at getting into corners and edges of flat surfaces the way that ROS units just can’t match, and can be used for really fine sanding, if desired. I think I’ll do that after church tomorrow.
Tomorrow, my Mom and maybe Dad are coming down to help us. Lots of stripping and hopefully some sanding are the order of the day. We’re getting closer.
jonathan
