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.