#4 - Stripping Like Diablo Cody

OK, not really stripping like Diablo Cody (the author of Juno and the hilarious oeuvre "A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper".)  Stripping paint off the trim is faaaaar less glamorous than anything Diablo might do with a pole and some heels.

The origin of this project was that the paint job on some of the trim in the living room is terrible.  At some point in the misty distant past, someone obviously needed a fast paint job, and slapped paint over severely chipped areas.  Exhibit A:

Almost two years ago I experimented with using a heat gun to strip some of the trim in the living room.  So for two years we've been living with this:

Ugh.  The heat gun worked pretty well, stripping off years of paint in one go.  It's not perfect, it does leave some marks behind, and it isn't incredibly fast.  However, I think it is actually cleaner, easier and faster than chemical stripping. 

So I finally got on it already.  As I described in my earlier post on the stripping method, you basically hold a heat gun at the paint until it softens or bubbles, slide a putty knife underneath and peel the paint away.  Heat and peel, heat and peel, heat and peel...

Hmm.  I kept at it.

I finally got the whole window stripped!  (Sorry for the incredibly dark picture but you're really not missing anything.)

 

And...it looks worse than before.  Whomp whomp.  This sort of thing happens in renovations.  Two steps backwards, one step forwards.  

The husband says it just needs a coat of chemical stripper and it will instantly look perfect.  (No, that's not exactly what he said, but that is EXACTLY what I heard.)  I hope he's right, because otherwise I have been torturing myself of hours of putty knifing.  

I'm crossing #4 off the list, even though it isn't perfect, it is done.  And as we know: DONE IS BEAUTIFUL!  On to the next!