a day on your knees

That is how I would describe the act of scraping. Not long ago, we took what will first be our office and later be the girls' room (if we have girls---hoping!) and made it into the junk room. Not true junk. Just the stuff we use and can't quite place. Here's how it looked before we cleared things out, and this is key: we found/created "places" for the things we moved, rather than merely relocating junk to other junky places thus making our place junky.

And then, of course, there is the Case of the Travelling Doors. Said doors have mysteriously moved everywhere about the house but doorways. Here they are before they were recently captured and placed in their prisons, which give us new privacy!

We left those items we know will remain in the room and put all our scraping, sanding equipment below the desk for accessibility. 

The rest of the photos are not done well (the lighting was low), but you can see what the trim looked like pre-work:

First, I used a 60-ct. piece of sandpaper. Mom Hawk and I realized rather quickly that we needed this level of coarseness to get through years of lumped paint.

Scraping along existing lines:

The mess it leaves behind (ugh):

This next one expresses it all. It was getting dark outside, I'd been doing this for hours, and felt I was moving into a dark abyss of the-never-ending:

Then, the sun broke out after many days of overcast almost-winter weather!

Here's a bit of what the trim looked like after the primary sanding was completed (this photos are just exhilarating, eh?)

After coarse scraping, I went over every inch with a 150 ct. foam sandpaper, ensuring that the trim was smooth prior to priming:

As I write, our PlasterMan is upstairs cutting holes in our ceiling so as to best patch them. Therefore, we've not added work to the above list in a couple weeks. But after Christmas we hope to finish the trim in the final two bedrooms and begin painting them. This will leave us with only the bathroom.

Another celebratory housewarming... hmmmm?

icj,

~j

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