Still in the stripping phase of work. This part is very tedious and progress is slow and steady. With all of this stripping, I think here is why most old house work is not economically feasible to be done by contractors. Asking a contractor to strip all of the moldings, built-in and door, strip the gypsum plaster from the lime plaster, and then strip the latex paint from the ceiling wouldn’t make sense for a contractor to take on as a job. They’d be tied up for so long that they’d have to charge a ton in labor to make it worth their while. I see why the common solution is to tear everything out to the studs and rebuild from there. Since this is a labor of love and my goal is to preserve the original features, I plug away each weekend making a small amount of progress.

This weekend, I made some good progress on the door to get it almost looking like natural wood. Last week I did the stripping with the SpeedHeater, so this weekend it’s with the CitriStrip. Since the door has glass windows, I’m nervous about applying the intense heat near the glass and instead I’ll strip those portions 100% with CitriStrip. After a few coats of the stripper and lots of scraping and washing with turpentine, I get the door about 80% done.

The doors are pretty blotchy so once I get all of the paint off, I’ll try maybe bleaching and sanding things down before applying linseed oil as the washcoat. It looks like the door is veneer so I may have similar issues I had with the bathroom door in the cottage where it doesn’t seem to absorb stain or color very well.

With the door moving along, back to the actual bathroom where I keep working on the molding but also start tackling the interior of the built-in. There are a bunch of shelves and most are painted white. These are a little tricky to navigate because the SpeedHeader doesn’t fit in the tight area and also the paint doesn’t bubble up very nicely.

Then to end things off, some more scraping of gypsum from the walls which never seems to end and doesn’t look like I’m ever making progress. Then I make a change to a fresh blade and start peeling off the latex paint on the ceiling. I’m not sure what’s exactly under the paint because it doesn’t quite look like lime plaster, but also doesn’t seem like gypsum.