This weekend was back to the cottage bedroom to remove the last bits of calcimine paint. That makes it sound like it was a small amount of work, but the pace was still very slow and tedious. I had a few sections of wall that needed a full removal so I started there. This time I swapped out the TSP with vinegar. It seemed like the acid in the vinegar helped dissolve the paint better, maybe because calcimine is a base? Once I got all of the main calcimine washed off, I then needed to go back over all of the cleaned surfaces and try to scrub off the little spots I missed.

After I hit the spots, I recruited Karen to help with a clean water wash. The walls were clean, but still had a film of blue paint film on them. There were lots of streaks and the problem is that once you dirty the water with some calcimine paint, every time you wipe down it just smears paint around. So we tried the approach of 2 buckets. I had a bucket of soapy vinegar water which I scrubbed down a section of a cleaned wall with a sponge. I then wiped down the soap and Karen followed with a damp paper towel dipped in a bucket of clean water. She mopped up the soapy and paint film and then threw away the paper towel to avoid contaminating the water and spreading the paint around. Then we followed with a dry paper towel to get any remaining mess.

This worked pretty well and the walls started looking clean. After we hit the entire room, I then removed the tape around the baseboards and had another strip of calcimine paint to wash off near the baseboards. Once that was done, I called Karen back in and we repeated the clean water wash. Finally, there was a little strip of paint on the top of the baseboard, so Karen and I used the Speedheater Cobra to go around the room, heat the top of the baseboard and scrape of the top layer of paint.