I've got two comparison shots that will show the progress Tim's made.
This is after several rounds of Citri-strip and scraping:
And this is after mineral-spirits treatment:
Here's a zoom out of the area, with the vertical shown in the picture above on the left:
Pretty awesome! Tim reports that he's getting the hang of things, so that's really encouraging.
BTW, we've divided this task into parts according to relative height: Tim will be doing the verticals (door frames, windows) and I'm going to do the baseboards. So that's likely why the beautiful wood you see in the last picture is one of the verticals. Let's hope he can teach me how to do it as well with the baseboards.
Also, this closeup shows that this is likely to be heart pine. Check out this history on heart pine in the United States if you are interested. Yes, I know it's a company that sells wood for interiors, but the write-up was pretty cool: http://www.heartpine.com/about/history_heartpine.shtml It would be awesome if that was the case, and if the floors matched, even better. Because the floors were painted and are currently in such bad shape, it's hard to tell right now if the coordinate with the baseboards and wall trim.
I hate Citri-Strip. I'm pretty sure I used it once and it was pure garbage. I've done my fair share of stripping antique furniture, and I used to use a certain brand that's now discontinued (so I can't recommend it). That stuff would start to blister the paint within seconds, and after about a minute you could scrape off a good 5 layers of paint. I haven't found a decent replacement yet, but I'd say try Poly Super Strippa, which is better (stronger) than the Citri-Strip, but not quite as good as the other brand I used. I have been meaning to try another brand, but I still have a bunch of Poly left...
ReplyDelete