what is it?

You may have wondered from a previous post, what the heck is that? Well, it’s an IPR. What’s that, eh? An infrared paint remover.

People have been trying to devise ways to safely remove paint for years. There’s always the nasty chemicals that do a pretty good job, but they’re nasty chemicals for a reason. There’s safe chemicals, but they don’t usually work as well as the nasty group. People have also used heat, to soften the paint so it can be subsequently scraped off. Heat guns can often increase the temperatures too much and burn the wood. There’s the Silent Paint Remover which uses infrared heat (from quartz crystals). And then there’s the Silent Paint Remover knock-off (generically called the Infrared Paint Remover).

We’ve been using Citristrip, a supposedly safe non-toxic chemical to soften and scrape paint off the trim, but with over 5 coats of paint, I’d have to use Citristrip multiple times (3-4x) on the piece just to get to the bare wood. And each time, you have to wait at least 30 minutes for the chemical to soften the paint. Well, we’ve known about the Silent Paint Remover for a long time from other blogs and This Old House, but at a cost of $400+ or a rental for $25/day, it probably did not seem worth it to us. A quart of Citristrip costs less than $10 which we used for half the trim in the bedroom. Both methods require lots of elbow grease (scraping). But Citristrip makes a gunky wet paint residue that needs to be cleaned up. But after scraping with the SPR, the paint dries back up (ie. relatively easy to clean).

Anyway, about a month ago, I turn to my vast unlimited home improvement resource (the google) and a search for “silent paint remover” yields a very promising link called “how to make an infrared paint remover.” I’m eventually led to someone’s home improvement site where he gives detailed instructions on how to make one from a heater you can pick up at most home stores. A week later and I’ve finished building it (with a couple of improvements). Serena gives it a test whirl, and voila.

Fast forward to this past weekend. After a holiday break, we get back to work on the bedroom, scraping the paint off the trim. The IPR works, but it’s still a pain, and we’d still need chemicals to get into some of the nooks, crannies, and curves of the trim to finish the paint removal. And we started having another problem, the grain of the trim was just too much. The trim was probably meant to always be painted over or stained really dark so the grain would not show. And then the really great weather just topped it off (temperature reaching 70 degrees, for January in the Northeast).

We decided to scrap the rest of the paint removal and decided to enjoy the day. And then we came to the realization that we should spend less time on the house.

So know we have an IPR that I made, not getting much use. Alas.

But I made it, and it works, how cool is that?