Stripped bare

Today began with some more heat gunning of the final downstairs door jamb. I may have to whip out my rediculously hot piece again at some point on the downstairs areas to finish them off, but the bulk of the gloss is finally gone.

I have learnt that going floor to top with the heat gun is definitly easier than top down, since the latter results in burnt fingers and paint flakes landing on the nozzle, where they do burn and create an evil smell. Working down to top, chunks of hot paint inevitably fall back down and stick to area you've just cleared. Trying to scrape them off as you go is like pushing water uphill, the scraper will be forever clogged up with junk as you strip the topcoats, and trying to scrape off detail at this point will deposit some of that junk from the scraper back onto the frame. No, best forget them, like those guys in saving private ryan. They won't adhere to the wood again beyond a superficial stickyness. Once they're cold, a lot of them will snap off when wire brushed.

Next, I went back to the time attack toilet door jamb and gave it a lick of DCM stripper. Wow, now I remember how much it stings when it gets in your eyes and on your skin.... that much -----> |----------------------loads-----------------------|

The stripper worked nicely for getting the remaining sticky nastyness off, but I also had to do at least an hours worth of work with the scraper to pull the gunk off. I found angling the scraper and dragging it with one hand on the handle and the other on the blade it's self made it easy to put lots of force and control into cleaning out the corners of the profiles. Then, another wash with acetone and disposable tissue to get the remains of the stickyness of. 

You can see I decided to illuminate the jamb with a 500w halogen lamp. That makes it much easier to see what needs doing. And with it off, it'll be virtually impossible to see what you've been able to see with it on.

To finish today, I picked up a really sharp fruit knife and used that to clean out the corners of the profiles entirely. This made the profile stand out much better than it ever has, because all the edges are redefined rather than a rounded mess. Again, both hands on the knife, with one on the blade to guide it and another towards the handle for force. It's sharpe enough that I could plane, or shave, an immeasurably fine layer from the wood, removing the surface mess well. Along the corners, the tip of the blade tends to dig in. This isn't such an issue, as any coating applied over the wood now is likely to fill small gaps anyway. Also, this whole game is visual trickery of the mind. If someone sees white gloss under a darker stain, it'll shine out from a mile away. Slight digging in at the corners however will be masked because it's all the same colour. It's also easy for the mind to excuse it as character and aging, which is apparent all over the jambs from the knocks they're taken in almost a century of use.

The knife trick doesn't work so well on the rounded profile areas.

Scrubbing at the wood with a metal pan scourer I can easily level off small scrapes and remove much of the residual muck. This jamb, while still not finished, has reached a point where it has a smooth, tack free surface. Now it needs the knocks and various holes that have been drilled or cut into it dealing with and it's there. Maybe five or six hours of work on this one so far.

Yep - more stripping

I decided to do some more paint stripping today. It's hard to do more than one door jamb without a break, it takes about an hour and half to two hours for each heat gunning, and that's working flat out.

First order of the day, attacking the time attack door jam with a bowl of acetone & scourering pad. Here, you want to work from top to bottom, since the acetone loves running out of the pad and down the door jamb. It's good to have a massive roll of tissue available to wipe off the residue as you go, assuming you're stripping varnish and not left over gloss - which is what I'm doing. The door jambs first ever coat in life was some dark varnish in the 20's, which I'm now removing in preparation for some new varnish. I had rubber gloves on using the acetone, but my right hand was ICE cold and had chill burns on it like I'd had it in the freezer. Undergloves are a good idea. As is some extreme ventilation. The smell won't knock you out and it isn't toxic, but it absolutely stinks - and I love solvents, acetone is a lame solvent smell wise, not a scratch on petrol or spray paint.

The acetone varnish stripping is also a huge mess, there was acetone dissolved varnish four or five feet away splattered on the wall. Definitly want to do this before finishing anyway walls or floors.

It takes about an hour to scrub each down with acetone. Making it about two and half or three hours to the current finish, which still isn't clean enough.

There's loads of gloss coming off, I'm storing it all in one black bin bag and it's already a few pounds I'd guess. You can see I've pulled a skirting board off in one of the pictures. 

Skirting boards are not really for decortation. When you plaster or render, inside in particular, you don't take the skimming to the floor. This serves two purposes. It stops moisture wicking up the walls from the foundations and it means you don't pull "bits of shit", as my plastering tutor called them, up off the floor as you skim. Even the tiniest "bits of shit" that you miss when cleaning up will catch in the skim and drag big, horrible lines through your work. It's impossible to get a good final plaster finish with and "bits of shit" near the trowel. Even hardening bits of plaster from other work you're doing will mess up the finish, especially at the corners where it dries quickly and it's easier to leave lumps on adjacent walls. So you always avoid going right to the floor, where billions of "bits of shit" live. The skirting boards hide the uncovered sections of the wall near the floor. 

It seems whoever laid the original woodblock floor, which is a herringbone / parquet pattern, did so after putting the boards on. And whoever sanded it, didn't pull the boards before doing so. The big wheeled sander, like a vacuum cleaner, won't go right up to the edges. You can use an edge sander, which is a like a very powerful disc sander and kind of handheld size, to do up to the boards, but that takes a lot of care and even then it's easy to chew up the boards or leave the edges of the floor with a lip of uneven sanding.

With the boards pulled off, it'll be much easier to go right up to the bare wall. With them back on, any uneven edging will be hidden. You can also use beading to extend the depth of the board even further and cover a wider gap of errors. It's just a little decorative strip, maybe a cm by a cm (haf inch by half inch), you pin nail onto the base of the skirting to form a thicker lip where it meets with the floor.

I did two doors today with the heat gun and pulled the door off the front room, which has made the hall lots, lots lighter. I'll either leave this door off or replace it with one in glass in it.

After scourering with acetone, I wiped them down with a j-cloth soaked in acetone and wiped it off with some tissue as I went. Still a big sticky mess. More attention needed.

More paint stripping

Edit: My mate Steve asked about paint thickness. That's not really too much of an issue with heat guns. The gloss doesn't peel in layers, it all comes off back to the base because the heat causes pockets of air to expand between the gloss and the wood. It's not melting the paint. All the gloss layers come off in one go, because they act like a plastic film that's floating on a pocket of air.

Decided to time attack a door jamb this morning. To the heat gun finish took about an hour and half working about as quick as the gun will peel it. I also found it much easier to work uphill, so the waste heat would prewarm the paint ahead. If you have some coordination, you can be holding the gun and sweeping it over the area ahead as you strip with the knife, so there's no wasted time.

It actually helps if the paint has a second or two to cool after being bubbled, since it makes it less likely to go gummy when peeled and more likely that it'll all come off in one strip.

I picked up some paramores stripper (DCM, dicholoromethane & methanol) for 20 pounds from toolstation.com my favourite place in the world - they're cheaper than everywhere I've checked, screwfix included. If your order exceeds 10 pounds, you get free next day shipping. You also get free tea and coffee while the staff collect your order in the warehouses. :^P

The doorjambs are going to need a multisolvent treatment to get them nice and clean I expect. The heatgun leaves little flecks of paint stuck that are just annoying to pick off one by one with the gun, so the chemical stripper is a smart move after 99% has been heat peeled. The stripper pack says it's fine to start from the first coat, which means you'd waste a ton of stripper compared to using the heatgun, then using the chemical method for the last stages of cleanup. I probably spent about 8 - 16p on electricity for the heatgun, versus pounds or tens of pounds if I'd used the chemical stripper from the start.

Buy a wire brush from TS for 96p and give the door a brush down to get any loose flecks off when they're cold.

Doing this kind of stripping with paper, I wouldn't have finished one jamb today, would have a very sore arm even if using a sander and be down a lot of paper. The paper would also not get into the details anywhere near as well as the heat gun - which works sound as a dollar pound. In fact, it'd tend to sand them down, which is what I'm trying to avoid by stripping instead of going straight on with another gloss coat over the old.

In terms of gloves for chemical stripping, you can have a look at the following guide:

Click Me

Basically, for acetone you want in order of degredation resistance from best to worst: 

Unsupported neoprene or natural rubber, then a combination of the two is next best

For DCM (stripper), you want:

Suppored PVA (NOT PVC)

That's right, PVA, like woodglue. Maybe you could just paint PVA all over a pair of more accessible gloves. It's not as suprising as it sounds. DCM likes attacking nonpolar things like oils and greases. PVA is water soluble, and water doesn't like grease or oils.

The best option is just to work so it doesn't drip on you and dry your skin out. Neoprene gloves are easy to find, PVA isn't so easy. The odd drip on your hands won't hurt you at all.

The white stripe you can see left on the door jamb is emulsion, which won't bubble off with heat.

The correct term for oil paint is alkyd paint. The oil is the solvent in the paint. It evaporates off slowly and then the paint oxidizes and turns into a film by a process called crosslinking, where the paint molecules join up into a network. Emulsion (latex) uses water as the solvent and an acrylic as the binder - it doesn't really have latex in it. When the water is gone, the acrylic binder ties the paint into a network. You can scrub the emsulsion off with water, but it's very hard work once the acrylic has set into a network.

There are three parts to paints. The pigment, the solvent and the binder or vehicle. The pigment is obvious. The solvent is also kind of obvious. The binder is the real difference and in this case is crosslinking oxidation for gloss and acrylic resin for emulsion.

So what? Well, that's why gloss takes weeks to dry even when it's gone all sticky, the paint is oxidizing in the air. Emulsion dries in hours because only the solvent needs to evaporate for the film to form into a network.

Testing out the heat gun - paint stripping

The woodwork around our house has never been stripped, only ever repainted with layer upon layer of gloss.

It's finally at the point that another layer is pushing it.

I picked up a DeWalt heat gun, skeptical of the process, but was amazed to see how well it works on gloss. Even getting round all the profiling detail of the door jambs was super easy. The paint bubbles off right to the bare wood all around the hot patch and comes off as a kind of film, rather than a sticky mess. You just peel the film off with the scraper. Very easy! The film will literally peel like a rubbery orange, it shouldn't be molten or burning.

It's easy not to burn things around the gloss, since the gun needs to be right up to the paint and turned all the way up to bubble it off at a decent rate. Which is about 600C at the outlet for this 2kw DeWalt version.

Under the gloss, I discovered a layer of stain or varnish. That doesn't come off, it bubbles and burns.

I hit it up with a pair of my favourite solvents, dichloromethane (DCM, or 'paintstripper' to the commonger) and acetone. Suprisingly, acetone works really well, I could basically wipe the door clean.

In the scaled up version, I will use a bowl full of it, scourering pad and gloves, which need to be butyl rubber to resist the solvent. Acetone isn't particularly toxic, flammable or dangerous, but spending hours with your mits in it will dry your skin out big time.

A big 5l container of pure acetone will set you back all of ~15 pounds, where a 5l tin of stripper will be more like 25 or 30. Stripper is about 50 - 70% DCM (solvent) mixed with a polymer. The solvent is too thin to paint on, so the polymer is added to thicken it up and make it stick to vertical surfaces. Contrary to popular belief, stripper is not very dangerous at all. DCM is not particularly toxic and the fumes won't knock you out. It does dry the skin out better than anything else I've seen and it really hurts if it gets in your eyes. It'll dissolve most rubbers as well, making it a pain to find suitable gloves for.

Tool porn

Well here it is, the highest wattage grinder around armed with a diamond blade - incidentally, I have another of these up for sale if you happen to want one (look to the right) ----------> over there somewhere up near the top. It's all but new off the shelf.

When we had the old garage knocked down, we had to leave a section of brickwork sticking out, because it tied into the party wall and our neighbours came round to photograph and complain about me touching it, despite it being our brickwork and on our side of that wall. 

That wall will soon be repainted and trelis put up over it to hide it's disgusting appearance without the effort of rendering it or the waste of throwing out the trelis that was previously attached to the long wall in the garden. So the brickwork had to go, it was sticking out an entire bricks depth and would mean suspending the trelis that far from the wall, way too far. 

Five minutes of death defying angle grinding up a ladder later, and some bolster violence, 99% of it is gone. What remains are the stumps of the bricks that tie in through the party wall. They're so loose I may remove those by hand, cut them in half and mortar them back in to get the wall flush.

You can see the neighbours asbestoes garage roof, and remains of our own plastic version, are still stuck to the top of the wall. If I get ambitious, I will tidy that up as well. The wall is already flush enough that a standard trelis baton will suspend that trelis above most of the rubbish still sticking out, an extra half inch of baton depth would cover it all. So it's all a matter of effort versus effect now.

Once the wall is white and the trelis white or brown, it'll work as camouflage, 'specially  once it's covered in climbers.

Here you can see me modelling a standard up north tangerine tan.  

It's Sunday and I'm knackered, so the only other thing I'm thinking of doing is getting out the laser level and determining the levels I need to til the garden to - but that depends how many cans of beer I drink before then. Coordinatin is rarely improved by the creature.

Buwwaaaa - the floor sander & rotovating

That's the kind of noise a floor sander makes.

Picked it up this morning (hi Jan! :P ). With so much sanding to do, it was cheaper to buy it than rent. Ironically, this one is coming from a hire tool wind down. Cosmetically, well used. Mechnically, it's an absolute monster, the base is hard to lift and a ferrous casting. The motor is gigantic and obviously rated for high duty at the full output. There are Alto / Clarke & Hiretech who make most of these sanders. These Alto ones seemed cool to me because they have a handle to raise the drum and three casters, so you can easily steer 'em around and don't have to pick the machine up and drop it down at the ends of each strip. Leaving the drum in contact with the floor while it's spinning, without moving the sander along, will chew a hole into the wood almost instantly - so smoothly tapering in and out of each run is the difference between "I just wrecked my floor" and "Whoa... it's like a mirror!".

Sander collected, Alex and I got on with rotovating the sawdust into the garden. It became apparent real quick that we are going to need at least a few more of those massive bags to loosen up the clay. We found the foundations we hadn't taken up with the old garage and they were getting in the way of rotovating. Around the new garage, the clay is almost entirely rubble and grit. There's also a drain gully down there that needs pulling and capping.

Out come the spades and into the sticky, annoying, heavy, foul smelling clay we began digging, deciding to stop at 7pm. The clay is terrible. It's so pure it's easier to slice it off with the spade and pick it out by hand, that's how bad.... Digging is apprentice work. A perfectly clean hole 5ft into the floor is suprisingly rewarding though.

As luck would have it, this piece of junk we no longer need, and for some reason didn't get rid of when we had the hydraulic JCB breaker to hand (I think because we were bothered about snapping the clay drains beneath), is one of the strongest bits of the house I've had to wreck so far.

The blue thing is the water mains. Houses this old in the UK usually have a lead water mains. It's not a health problem because lead isn't at all soluble in tap water, and an oxide coating builds up on the inside of the pipe over time anyway - you only need to worry about lead when you're dealing with salts of it, which'll dissolve into your bloodstream. But the pipe bore is small, so flowrates through it are low and there's a lot of pressure drop. The new plastic 25mm MDPE is much better. It's also incredibly easy to cut with a rachet chopper and uses pushfit connectors, so no more messing around with blowtorches and solder.

The blue MDPE is moled in through the ground using something that looks like an industrial sex toy. It vibrates back and forth and chews through the ground. The guys dig a trench every few metres, drop into it and let it go, then catch it and send it back on it's way at the next trench. It was 400 pounds to have our mains redone. Quite a lot, but just about worth it. I remember watching the guys dig it in and jeeez, I wouldn't want to do it. There were about five of them going at it all morning with spades, through clay. Nasty. Their apprenctice was on fag duty, constantly running back and forth with five cigarettes between his fingers to keep the workers charged up.

Not sure why they decided to make the new water mains 25mm. Standard pipe has always been 22 or 28mm. It's very cheap, about half the price of standard plastic plumbing. It'll only take cold water. At 25mm and costing so little, I plan to run it right up to the points of use in the house so I don't have to pay for long runs of the more expensive PEX and PB pipes (which are heat resistant).

Alex loved being Mr R. Otorvator for the day. Watching someone turn it on for the first time is always worth the effort, as it takes off dragging them behind it. But the beast is quickly tamed. It's much more effort than it looks, since the best churning is achieved by dragging it backwards, against the direction of the 4hp pulling it the other way. Your back will ache. It's weirdly fun just because the throttle has a picture of a tortoise and rabbit on it. Then there's revving it right up to the full open setting that's meant for cold starting it, which is like nitro mode on a racing game - it'd only be better if it played Benny Hill music at the same time.

Oh yea... and check out that rock under the spade. I thought we'd gotten rid of all that 60's attempt at a rockery, but no, there's more. I carted two or so tons of the rock to the front garden the day before - darn 60's enthusiasm and hope, creating large rockeries for me to dig up... Needless to say, the rotovator doesn't enjoy hitting stone potatoes, but it also has an automatic clutch that disengages the tines (blades) when it catches on something. That, or it jumps around like a crack addict having a fit.

I have my replacement DeWalt 9" grinder. 2.6kw of destructive power.... yea baby... there ain't no messing around with this dirty bitch. It'll knock the breakers out if it's not plugged into the cooker socket - with it's 10mm^2 line and higher current breaker. Also picked up a DeWalt heatgun for stripping the woodwork inside, 2kw makes for a hot hairdryer. Obviously, I had to experiment putting my hand infront of it just to make sure it actually did get hot.

The wheelbarrow is on it's way out. But damn! For 15 pounds, one of the most useful things I've ever bought. It's shifted literally tens of tons of concrete that we've thrown into it, and it's still going. The first time we used it was to shift 40 tons of broken crete, rubble and rock from the yard. Then the entire brick structure of the garage. I don't know if I'll have the heart to throw the sucker out. Look, it's all beaten into an oval with all that work... awwww...... Wheelbarrow, I salute you! xxx

Sawdust day

You ever see that film Dune? :P

The soil in the garden is almost pure clay, having been under tarmac and paving for at least 30 years and a few inches of concrete for 20 years or more - it was originally put there by glacias, the clay. Beneath it is sand and sandstone. To cheaply restore organic mass to the soil and allow it to drain, I scored these gigantic bags of sawdust from Hews Gray for all of 3 english pounds - this much premulched bark would be around 90.

It was applied when raining to damp it down and will be rotovated in when I recover from the last week. 

Goggles and dust mask to keep all the fine stuff out my mouth and eyes - itchy.

The dust may drive the pH acidic, but lime has also been added to flocculate the clay and that will drive the pH the other way, so the two will even out.

The ground has already been rotovated with composting accelerator and chicken manure. The manure will supply nitrogen to the bacteria and fungi that will attack the wood dust - both these two need the nitrogen to synthesize amino acids, which then make the proteins and enzymes they use for digesting carbon sources, in this case the wood dust. Over the next few months, the soil should warm up as the wood is composted in situ, until I'm ready to seed a lawn - like a gigantic steaming compost heap. I went for chicken manure as it'd supply more of the essential trace elements - moly, copper and such - than pure ammonia based feeds. It comes as hard, dry, mechanically compacted pellets. The smell in the bucket is bad, but disappears as it's rotovated. Chicken manure is also cheap for the quantity of nitrogen and trace elements it contains, real cheap.

Need to be very careful and patient making pH changes given the scale of the neutralizations and buffering taking place - it will easily take weeks for the changes to start, maybe months to a year for the full effects to be seen

20kg of lime (only 1 or 2kg used so far) ~7.99

Compost accelerator ~2.99 (Carr garden centre)

Sawdust 3 pounds (for all of it, Carr garden centre)

Chicken manure 5.99 a pack, one used so far (Carr garden centre)

Total, not a lot at all