Hanging the Lamp
The lamp from the cottage porch is refinished and ready to hang. I bought some reproduction lamp parts from Sundial Wire. They sell antique style cloth wire along with plugs and sockets. I follow their tutorials on how to rewire the lamp and after much fishing wire through the wood, I’m able to get everything hooked up and working.
Re-assembled and wired lamp.
The last step is cleaning the old metal hanger. I use chemical stripper for that and then apply some metal dye. While that dries, I go back to plaster and wood work.
Cleaning the lamp’s hanger.
The plaster work is more hand-scraping of the paint on the plaster in the 2nd story stairs landing.
Scraping paint.
Starting to scrape paint.
Most of this plaster around the door frame is all done.
When my shoulders get tired from scraping, I continue scraping paint from the built-in, this time focusing on a drawer. Like the rest of woodwork, things start with heat stripping and then move to chemical stripping followed by an alcohol rinse. The paint on the built-in is pretty tough and it seems the chemicals work better than the heat.
Starting heat stripping.
The underside of the drawer.
Typical of old wood with latext on time and older oil-based below that.
After heat stripping iwht all of the latex paint off, but still a good amount of older oil paint.
After chemical stripping and rinsing with alcohol.
With the door frame to the exterior nicely painted blue, I decide to not just rehang the nasty screen door without trying to spruce that up. The screen door is made of some composite wood and it has a very plasticy white paint on it. Then the previous owners tried painting over that with white paint. Either the paint wasn’t good or the surface wasn’t prepped (or both), because that second paint job is all flaking off. I scrape the door and then rough things up with a random orbital sander using a low grit. After prepping the door, I paint it with white primer. As that dries, the lamp’s metal hanger is ready to reattach and we can hang the lamp.
Priming the door.
I reattach the metal hanger, and then screw that back up and plug in the lamp, and luckily everything works!
About to re-attach the hanger.
The lamp in action.
Once the primer is dry, I paint the door with the same blue paint as the frame. Once that dries, I rub some linseed oil on to the metal hinges and rehang the door. The door doesn’t quite close using the old hinge placements and it seems like it needs to be raised up about a 1/4”, but I don’t want to let perfect be the enemy of done, so I leave the door as-is until I can get someone else help me rehang the door.
Painted screen door.
The door still rubs against the threshold from the previous hinge placement.
The scraping never ends and the final bit is the concrete flower bed in the front of the house. After many applications of CitriStrip, followed by scrubbing with concrete cleaner, I have most of the loose paint off. There are a bunch of cracks in the concrete, including a fairly large gouge so I mix up some patching compound to smooth things out. I use Planipatch for the repairs and I’m able to kind of feather off the large crack. I keep misting that for the next few hours and now will just need to decide what color to paint this.
Stripped concrete. Note the large crack in the center.
After filling cracks.
The large crack is not as noticeable.
