Cottage Cleaning

Another weekend of more cleaning. I've been making so many trips to the Cape May County dump, the ladies working there must think I'm some weirdo with illegal shit going on in my house. I continued scrubbing my way through the cottage to get that as clean as possible since I'm racing the clock to get this up on the rental sites for summer. 

Cottage kitchen

As I'm scrubbing the cottage end to end, I'm taking note of the old colors hidden under the paint and starting to get a feel for how the cottage was built. It looks like the cottage definitely was without a bathroom to start. The current bathroom looks completely tacked on to the building and it's effectively part of the porch. It reminds me of the bathroom in my grand mom's Philadelphia row home where my dad said he grew up originally with an outhouse. The bathroom is tacked on off the kitchen and it's 1 step away from being outside with flimsier walls and ceiling.

Inside I see a lot of textured surfaces which definitely seem to be added later. The texturing is not done consistently so there's parts where the original smooth plaster remains. The neighbor stops by to take a look and he points out that the chimney used to be between the kitchen and living room. I don't see how that could have worked without making the passage way extremely awkward. In this case I think it may have made sense to remove the chimney even though I miss it on the roofline. 

Testing out the Speedheater infrared stripper.

Cleaning all weekend takes its toll on my and I feel completely beat up from scrubbing and painting. To have a little fun, I try more stripping of paint with the infrared stripper I read about on the Craftsman blog. I continue making my way down the molding stripping paint off and it works pretty good except for getting the paint in the crevices. I end up setting off the smoke alarm and that ends my fun.