So, do you want to see what 4 hours of work and a couple of trips to Home Depot got us??
If you're wondering what you are supposed to see (no this isn't a fancy 3-d image), here is the before:
Funny when the before looks better than the after isn't it? (insert sarcasm here). The porch paint is peeling like there's no tomorrow...we think the previous owners used interior paint before they sold the house to perk up the porch for the sale. This is what we were dealing with:
Since the paint was peeling everywhere we decided we should strip it first, then sand, prime and paint. We weren't completely delusional when we started this project in thinking we would do all that today, but we were pretty sure we would get it down to the bones. Well, the first hour or so of the project involved highly toxic paint stripper, and a result that looked like this:
Yes, after an hour of stripping and scraping that was all the wood we could see. There must be 10 coats of paint on my porch, so needless to say the furniture stripper I bought for my nightable project did not do the job on the porch. Off to Home Depot we go...we ended up with a spray-on product and another "eco-friendly" stripper. We tried the spray product with no luck, therefore:
The Mr. headed back to Home Depot for another solution: A Heat Gun. We now call it our saviour:
It is pretty much a super-heated hair dryer with infrared heat that melts the paint away. Don't get me wrong, we still got a mega-arm workout scraping the paint but this actually took off more than one layer at a time so it's our winner.
After all was said and done, we did half the wall and had to deal with a lot of mess like this:
Hundreds of little paint-peeler-particles. This is only about 1/3 of the way through. So, next weekend will no doubt bring some more heat-gun-stripping and scraping. At least I can start to focus on the fun stuff - like what colour do we want to paint our porch?
5 comments:
YAY you got a car! Looking forward to seeing what you two picked! :)
Any type of "stripping" project I find soooo irritating. I'm lucky that B was the one outside this weekend sanding and stripping... he accomplished so much (I was resting and putting away peanut clothes haha)
Yikes! It looks like you have a big job on your hands, but it will be well worth it when you finish!!
I found that picture of the "after an hour of using highly toxic chemicals" picture amusing...but I'm sure you didn't! Heat guns are really the way to go. The former owners of our house used liquid nails to attach things (shower caddy, beadboard, mirrors to walls, flooring...) so we've found the heat gun to come in handy, as well, for peeling off that nasty stuff.
ohmy this looks like a biiig job. Keep up the good work!
Don't you just love it when your weekend starts with a bit of heat-gun stripping and scraping and countless trips to the hardware store? :) This looks like a real labour of love! I'm sure the end result will be worth all the hard work!
I've never used it myself, but there's a thing called the Paint Eater (like a large disc sander) that I've read on a few blogs is supposedly really good. You can find it on amazon, it might make things go more quickly.
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