Paula's Place

Paula's Place

Wednesday 9 August 2017

I don't know

I suspect that one of my most used words is "busy", today I should be busy working, the gardens of a couple of my favorite ladies should be receiving my attentions today, but the weather is against me.   Before anyone starts to complain that I'm a fair weather gardener ~ damn right I am! Mowers don't cut wet grass well, working wet soil causes structural damage, and wet backs are very bad for me as well.   Instead I am getting on with a project I started at the weekend, I'm redecorating the hall of my flat.

It is a very small flat, with a very small hall, but it does have four doorways and a three cupboards so lots of woodwork.   The cupboards I have painted it match the walls, so that was nice and simple, but the door frames had about sixty years worth of gloss paint on them. Layer upon layer of paint, so much the moldings have become blurred and what should have been nice sharp angles rounded.   They were so bad that I decided to strip all the paint and start again, maybe even leaving them as bare wood if they are good enough.   This is another of those "seemed like a good idea at the time" projects. I started off with a chemical stripper, but that smelt horrible and had little effect on the layers of paint.   I now have an electric paint stripper, basically a heat gun, but that sets off all my smoke alarms.   So today I am burning off paint with all my smoke alarms disconnected ~ Health and Safety?

I have no idea just how many layers of paint there are, but it must be at least a couple of mm thick.  The top layers come off quite easily, but the earlier ones are putting up a valiant fight, so far I have put in over half a day, and not even finished half a frame, and now I've started I've got to finish.

I just don't know why I started!

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