The goal is to remove all the paint from every single piece of trim at my brother's house. Every single speck and flake. I don't know how many people reading this have attempted to strip every piece door jam, plinth block, door trim, window trim, corner block in a 3000 square foot house, but it's very daunting. I know I tried here, and I gave up after one winter. I threw my heat gun in the basement and went the shellac route.
At first my brother was pulling the trim and taking it to a place in South Omaha that strips it...but at $1 per linear foot, it adds up. Then he bought some industrial strength chemical stripper, and tried that. While I was watching my mother smear the chemicals on one day, and saw what a mess it was making..I walked down to my house and dug out my old heat gun and brought it back to her...and demonstrated it's amazing abilities to make ancient paint turn to a butter-like consistency. I left my heat gun there, telling my brother that it was now his legacy.
I think my mother was really impressed, and it's what she's been using ever since. Even though my heat gun is a cheap model from men@rd's and the fast setting has long since died, it's still working....which amazes me. Princess even went out and bought her own heat gun, and the pile of painted trim has slowly been stripped of it's years of bland white paint.
This is one of the make-shift stripping areas. An old piece of baseboard is acting as a work bench. A piece of window trim is on top, in mid-stripping progress. On the floor is a couple days' worth of old paint that has been melted off.
After melting off a majority of the paint, the left over residue is scrubbed off with denatured alcohol in this trough my brother fabricated.
For the plinth and corner blocks with intricate details, my mother puts them in a tub of chemical stripper to get the bits of paint out of the details and then scrubs them some more.
This pic shows one of the piles of boards that has already undergone the heat gun, and are awaiting the denatured alcohol bath/scrubbing.
Like this one, that my mother is prepping.
Here's another pile of trim in the kitchen-area, awaiting alcohol scrubbing fun.
Just so you have an idea of HOW much has been done, look at the STACKS of plinth blocks on the left hand side of the pic.
A better view of the STACKS of blocks.
Finished corner block. One down, nine million to go.
