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[acidfree:342]
I have a lot of respect for people who restore furniture and woodwork. What they do is hard labor (even with chemicals), the chemicals are noxious and come with warnings about cancer in lab rats, the sanders leave your hands numb, and the sheer effort involved leaves your muscles sore… But I digress…
Our front door used to be an unsightly yellow. When the house was yellow, it was fine. When the house went gray (much like some of my hair) the yellow became, well… ugly.
So I bought some toxic chemicals and I sprayed them on the door and waited.
Then I scraped and found red and blue and white (primer, I think) and finally wood. But the paint didn’t come off easily. So I went to the hardware store again and got more stuff — sandpaper, steel wool, a different kind of paint stripper, putty knives and other painting gadgets. I also borrowed a couple sanders.
We put the door back in its partially sanded state (hey, it’s rustic!) and went to bed.
Early Sunday afternoon I started again. More toxic chemicals! More scraping!
The pressure washer! Hoooo-boy was that pressure washer effective! More paint came off. I let it dry and sanded again and then washed it again.
More paint came off.
Some bits of the door came off too. Ooops!
Nothing I can’t sand down, but I guess I got a little carried away with the pressure washer.
I felt like a backyard Rambo, giving the evil paint coats my worst. Go ahead red paint that can’t be sanded or chemically peeled off, make my day… (yes, I know that’s Dirty Harry…)
So now the door looks like this: [acidfree:340]
It’s not perfect, but it’s paintable. I’m sad we have to paint it because the wood underneath is kind of nice, but I lack the patience to spend the next week sanding away at a door we want to paint anyway. Look for a dark blue door on our house in the near future!