Our project this weekend (and for the next two weekends) is to "Krisel keep" our beams. The main posts/beams to our house are rotting on the outside. My husband noticed it while lying in bed admiring our house's windows one day. It's suppose to be an "El Nino" winter, which means a lot of rain, so we have to get on this project now while its dry and cooler.
The game plan is to/was to: pressure wash the beams and windows, strip all wood facing south, sand, repair beams, change rotted window molding, prime, paint and wa-la! Ah, it's never that easy.
During the pressure wash the stucco on the south wall started coming off easier than expected. I think we will want to finish scraping that wall clean. (add it to the list) That made me want to test the nearby garage wall that now has no stucco but does have an old coat of paint. Paint came off sort of easy. Now, I know I'll have to rent a professional pressure washer to do the entire house after we take the stucco off and before painting. (add that to the list)
Contrary to my memory, stripping the paint was not/is not easy. I use to refinish furniture in high school and I remember stripping pieces with 4-5 coats of paint and it was never this hard. I think strippers today are weaker than 20 years ago. As long as you left the stripper on for an hour the paint scrapped right off. Not so now.
I bought two different products at Home Depot. Jasco was a better buy but the trick is to slather it on, wait less than 15 minutes (contrary to instructions). As soon as you see the paint start to bubble, start scrapping. If the stripper dries it's too hard to scrape off. AND, it DOES NOT take off more than one coast of paint at a time! I looked at two other methods/products I found on This Old House.com but neither were available at Home Depot or Lowes.
This stripper from Home Depot is not worth the money.
This is the better buy. Not that great tho, in my opinion.
If you've tried using RemovAll or the Silent Paint Stripper I'd love to know how it worked. Next go around at this I'm renting the Silent Paint Stripper. It seems to the easiest and safest method with old lead paint....which I think we have and I'm sure I breathed in yesterday.
Next weekend we need to finish stripping and sanding. I thought we were going to be done with this phase. We still have more to do because the middle of the house is too high for my husband and I to safely reach. We should have rented scaffolding and we probably would have been further along. Half the battle was being in a safe position to muscle the scrapping.
I'm also looking at the best options for protecting and repairing the beams. So far these are a few articles I've found on This Old House.com:
Here's our rotting situation.
Labels: painting, restoring, wood work
