Thursday, March 31, 2005

Hallway To Hell

Everyone has one. You know what I'm talking about... that one project that no matter how much you work on it, it just doesn't seem to want to come to an end. Ours is our hallway. Other projects just seemed more important... like drywall in Seth's room, or re-doing the shed under the nook, or the garage roof...

I started last summer stripping the 7 layers & 2 borders of wallpaper off the walls, and the 5 layers off the ceiling. What it left behind was little tiny bits of the glue and paper all over the walls. Derek started stripping the woodwork in October- our goal was to have it all finished by the time Seth was walking, that and we wanted to loose the gates so we didn't have to lift Ella and/or her friends over them. One week before Christmas he was up and running and our hallway stopped in it's tracks.

Now that he's on the move, and only napping once durning the day, we can only work on it at night. Derek has been diligently stripping the woodwork, and doing a mighty fine job of it, too. He's using SuperStrippa by lePage and it works great until you get to the last layer. We aren't even sure of what it is. It seems to go all gooey with the stripper and clogs the scraper like crazy. Being the genius that he is, he started using methelhydrate on the last bits of whatever it is. I think that the hallway will look fantastic once all the plaster cracks are fixed (that will be my job), the doors and woodwork stripped and waterloxed, light fixtures, photos, and paint are finally up.

Hey, it might be done in time for Christmas! hahaha ! ;)

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Waterloxed? What's that?

Deb said...

oops, sorry I forgot to say what it was... here's the link: http://www.waterlox.com/
the door in the photo has about 3 coats of the waterlox matte finish on it after it was stripped and lightly sanded.

Anonymous said...

I think you should hire Trissa to come over and restore your stairway. Except that it would take her 8 months... :)

Derek said...

yeah, I guess it would only take 6 months to do ours, since there's no handrail ;) I don't really want to take ours apart, I'm afraid I'd never get it together again. The treads on the stairs are painted, so the corners will be a challenge. We'll be wishing we bought a Silent Paint Stripper. We can get a lot of chemical stipper for that price though.

Deb said...

maybe we could do some kind of trade... trissa to do our stairs and i could make a window for you or do a mural painting or something!!! probably take the same amount of time! lol