The dining room is the next to get restored to its better days, but what do we use to repair the walls? Pondering, pondering, pondering - oh the painful pondering! After reading hours upon hours (not an exaggeration) of conflicting information and not being able to find plaster, other than Plaster of Paris, we finally gave up and have been applying joint compound to our paper/paint combination removed leaving beautiful old plaster clean walls.
Ya know, Nicole Curtis, who I love, makes all that paper removal and cleaning up with vinegar and water look so easy and so quick. We knew it would be much harder than it appeared, but there's that little part of me who had hoped it was just that easy as it looked on TV. Forever the optimist!
This weekend will hopefully be the final coat to the walls, we hope! Then it will be time to paint. That has been back and forth multiple times - from a gold to a grey/green. I think we are at grey/green choice again. Now - what type of paint? Latex? Milk Paint? Primer first? Oil based? Water based? UGH!!!! Anybody have any thoughts on the matter of type of paint to use over lime plaster walls?
We also have on the near-to-do list to make the air vent to go above our faux fireplace, aka, air return ducts. We had an incident during the birthday party we don't want repeated. A poor, sweet young lady had her favorite red balloon sucked right in and down - gone forever! Still haven't found it! The plan for this is to create some fret work type of wood vent. Something like below, but with a more varied pattern.
We also are going to strip the numerous layers of paint from the trim and go back to shellacked wood. Oh what fun!
We have also now located natural hydraulic lime on the internet. We have ordered some to use to try a little tuck-pointing. Yikes.
Oh - also - we'll be hooking the upstairs tub back up to the plumbing.
And finally - but hopefully not finally - in other words it needs done ASAP - we've been waiting on a roofing company to get back to us to repair our roof and have not had a bit of luck with them, which has really been quite disappointing. We are going to be contacting a different local company this week and hopefully we'll have better luck.
I'm here to tell you that you CAN strip paint off wood. I've done it and I lived to tell the tale. We found great success using a handheld heat gun to take off the bulk of the paint, then follow up with chemical stripper, then sanding.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the encouragement! It's such a daunting task! We are going to get back to this soon. We got a infrared for Christmas and will be trying that out soon. A little concerned about use of the heat gun because of newspaper stuffed in places and material for some reason - I'm sure to stop air gaps.
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ReplyDeleteI just revisited your blog and saw that you took off your trim to strip it with the heat gun. Did you have very much problem with damaging the trim and / or the plaster when you took off the trim? Hubby is not to excited about taking all the trim off. What has your experience been. I'm still looking back at your sight, so I may run into your experience.
ReplyDeleteSharon @ Laurelhurst Craftsman thank you for your tip! Heat guns are what we ended up finding worked the best. I like our speedheater - but I tended to burn the wood because I was working to get paint off and trying to heat it up at the same time. You can see in our latest how well the heat gun worked. I should have taken pics of using it. We still have a bit more - all the trim and doors - I'll take some pics then. Thank you for your tip!
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