Cold Spaghetti

Close up of the test patch. The stripper is taking off the stain as well, so we’ll be down to bare wood. We’ll have to decide then how to proceed with treating it.

We moved the guest room bed to the side, put up sawhorses, and made the stage for stripping. This is the test patch started last night. It cured overnight, so we’re not sure exactly how long it needs (we’re hoping less than the 10 hours it got last night!)

Will, ever the observant and helpful boy, noticed the subtle changes in the house and decided to give some construction help. Here is he, getting his hammer to do some work. The following pictures charts his ‘helpful’ adventures with the hammer. Some explanation of the hammer… think ‘Roger Rabbit’ — it honks, beeps, boings, and whistles whenever you weld it through the air or land on anything. Too bad the sound effects aren’t available with the pictures… this was really hysterical…

What do I fix first?

Surely, he’s broken. All he does is sleep.

How about my chair? Maybe it could use some fixin’ up? 

What is this paper doing covering up the holes where the doors used to be? Let me use my hammer and help!

Hooray! I’m such a big boy to help out!

— We don’t need to punch holes in the walls… we can do this without major disturbance to the drywall.
— We’re pretty certain we can use the existing hardware, a substantial savings of money (around $400) and work (fitting it would be difficult… modern hardware hangs lower.)
— With Randy’s suggestion, we found a good stripper. The bummer is, we’ll have to spend about $300.

Yes, $300 for a stripper.

The method: first the hardware, then the door. It was difficult and very messy. They weren’t made to be taken out (a lot of being *just* an inch short of making it easy) and we experienced a decent amount of plaster rain and dust. We also discovered that one door has some mold. We’re pretty sure we know what it’s from: when the bank foreclosed, they stripped the house of everything of value that they could get (hardware, fixtures, cabinets), sprayed everything in the dirty beige oil paint you see everywhere, shut off the a/c, and shut the doors. Without the a/c to pull the humidity from the air (let’s be straight: our house is never below 80 degrees… the a/c only takes the humidity out of the air) and wet paint still on the doors that were pushed back into the walls… some mold grew.

Another interesting tidbit: one of the trim strips we removed had some writing on the back: “Pes Lamb Tongue Sldg 56 X 91 #279

Here you can see the track, which is screwed into a beam. The door hangs from rollers (four rollers on each end of the door) inside of the track. In this picture, one side of the track is gone and you can clearly see the second.