Stripping Paint

Before work starts for this weekend, we start things off visiting a demolition sale in North Wildwood. The property consists of two buildings with one a Cape Code style home and another a building built in probably the 1970s. The home has lots of luxury touches such as cedar closets and stone fireplaces. But like so many things, all headed straight to the dumpster.

1960s tech.

Acoustic ceiling tiles but in a cool pattern.

Back at the house, the hinges are all done with their clear coats so the final step is applying black wax to them. The was is rubbed on using a rag and then after about 30 minutes, the wax is buffed into the metal using a rag.

Waxed hinges.

With the closet door, I have one side that gets a 2nd coat of standard Waterlox. After that dries, I apply a coat of the satin Waterlox to both sides of the door. This door is all done and will be ready for hardware and installation next weekend.

Waterloxed door.

The main door is still a work in progress. I don’t mess with the other side of the door that had the stain drips and just focus on the good side. I start applying 1lb cut shellac with a first coat going down with a brush. Of course, the brush leaves some ridges/lap marks that I need to then buff down either with steel wool or applying some alcohol to try and melt the ridges down.

Applying shellac.

The paint in the next room is proving a bit more challenging than the other room. The main difference is that this room is not using any calcimine and looks like they used a strong oil based paint. It is pretty impervious to heat and with it probably being lead paint, I don’t want to do any dry scraping. I have a bunch of CitriStrip that I no longer use on wood, so I start slathering that on the wall and ceiling to see if that works.

CitriStrip cutting through top modern layer of latex paint.

The CitriStrip cuts through the top layer of latex paint pretty easily, but there’s multiple layers of stronger paint under that. Those older layers need multiple applications of stripper to make a dent.

Ceiling stripping.

Trying to remove oil paint on the ceiling.

The ceiling is similar with after the popcorn easily coming off, the stronger oil-based paint doesn’t bubble when using heat so I have to keep applying stripper to break it down. While the stripper cooks on the paint, I bounce back to the door and keep applying thin coats of shellac using a pad instead of a brush.

Padding the shellac.

The paint stripping is very slow and I start mixing in the more aggressive stripper into the mix to see if that gets the paint off, but I haven’t found a slam dunk approach to this room yet.

Get the latex off, but still dealing with tricky layers of paint.

Latex paint bubbling off.

Starting to see some bare plaster on this wall.

This room is similar to the bathroom where the top part of the wall is plaster, but below that is some other material. I don’t think it’s a sheet of sheetrock like the bathroom because it’s very thin. I wonder if it’s just a layer of linoleum or something like that. The pattern under the paint looks similar to the one in the bathroom so maybe they used the same wallpaper here.

Exposing the pattern originally used on the lower part of the wall.

Lots more stripping to do.

The shellacking is going OK, but there’s still a spot at the bottom of the door with lap marks. Like every time I work with shellac, I try to push things too far and get too aggressive trying to smooth out the lap marks. This causes me to damage the shellac. I can never just walk away. I’m going to let leave this alone for now and sand it down and reapply shellac next weekend.

This part of the door is looking good.

Trying too hard to fix lap marks and ended up botching things.