Stripping Old Paint

We're decorating one of the bedrooms - the red room, so named for the wall colours when we moved in - and part of doing so is giving all the woodwork a fresh coat of paint.

The stripped window frame, with blemishes filled, ready to paint
It took quite some effort, but the result was worth it

 
Rather than simply sand the window frames, skirting, and door frames, to provide a key for the new coat, we decided to take it back to the bare wood. Over the dozen or so decades since being installed, the detail on the architrave has been hidden by a build up of paint. This seemed like a good opportunity to reveal that detail once more.

A small section of the architrave scraped back to the wood
The test patch, conspicuously located at eye level

The test patch showed promise. A number of scraping tools were needed to get into the various parts of the moulding. The straight blades ensured the small flat parts remained flat. The curved blades, both convex and concave, while not matching the exact curvature, still allowed the rounded parts to be accessed, though care was needed to avoid leaving flat spots. The narrow recesses between the flats on the edge and the round middle were tougher; even the pointy triangular blade was too wide to reach in.


The three scrapers used for this job
The two Bahco scrapers on the right far outperformed the cheapo tool on the left

The solution was to rotate the tool in such a way that the angle of the point was reduced. This was somewhere between scraping with the handle below the blade, and scraping with the handle directly to the right of the blade.

The whole process took several full days, and was quite intensive. Progress was fastest when applying firm pressure, almost like digging in to the paint. The downside to this was that it resulted in many slips which gouged at the edges of the otherwise neat moulding.

The hardest part, counterintuitively, were the large flat surfaces - inside the window recess and on the skirting - for a couple of reasons. Firstly, flat is not always flat: the wood has moved ever so slightly over the years, meaning the large straight blade was rarely fully engaged. Secondly, it was difficult to apply adequate pressure upwards at height.

In the top photo of the window, the many patches of filler are visible along the window board. These were also gouged through carelessness, driven by a desire to get the job finished.

One of the dust masks, covered in dust after a day of scraping
These dust masks, and the m-class vacuum in the background, were invaluable 

The muck on each day's mask was a reminder of just how important it is to wear them. The scraping caused plumes of paint chippings and dust, with more than one layer of them certainly being lead-based.

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