Adventures in Remuddling

I posted about a month ago some of the problems we’ve had with the master bedroom.

So yes, it would be cool if all the trim were bare wood (no paint) and just finished with a nice stain or oil.

Since that realization, we stripped over 95% of the paint off the “difficult trim” (all around doors and windows) and stripped about 40% off the baseboards. The trim around doors and windows were stripped using Citristrip, the safe orange chemical that smells like citrus. This takes a few weeks as the chemical needs to be left for at least 30 minutes to soften up the paint for scraping. The trim needs at least 4 applications of the chemical to fully strip everything down to the bare wood (usually 2-3 applications work, but to clean the nooks and crannies, you need a few extra applications). We strip with specially made scrapers (they’re shaped for the curves of the trim - ie. teardrop, concave, convex, etc.). This is no doubt a time consuming process.

Low and behold the IPR or Infrared Paint Remover (or Silent Paint Remover). Long story short, I made one. Pretty cool, I know. We used this on the baseboard trim. But the nice weather got the best of us. And thus the bedroom saga just got truncated. So instead of stripping all the trim (just most of it) in the bedroom, we decided to just paint the damn thing. White, of course. No hassle with mixing stains, conditioning the wood, strange grain lines, etc.

And after a big final push with a 3-day weekend (thanks MLK), we finished and moved into the bedroom.  We just have to add some nice furnishings and light fixtures, and we’ll be done.