Stripping

I'm done stripping. The hours are long, it ruins my clothes, it makes a huge mess, the smell gives me a headache and I can pay somebody else to do it for me. I am of course talking about paint stripping.

Yesterday I picked up the trim from the paint stripping place. They are in the middle of moving their business, so things are a bit chaotic for them right now. In talking to the owner, the current economic crisis has also hit the commercial real estate market. For those businesses that are still solvent, there are opportunites to relocate to bigger or better locations. They've moved from the middle of nowhere, sandwiched between a roofing company warehouse and a scrap metal business, to one of those locations off of a major highway that you can see, but you'll never be able to figure out how to get to. Thank goodness for online mapping.

The shop is a mess at the moment and just walking in gives me a headache from the fumes. It's a very good reminder of why I don't want to work on stripping the wood in the first place. Originally they weren't planning on getting my pieces done for another two weeks, but a few of the pieces of trim are 14 feet long, and they were getting tired of tripping over them in the chaos of the move. The shop has all kinds of beautiful pieces of furniture in various states of repair and refinishing there. We have a broken, vintage Morris-style chair that came with the house that needs repair and refinishing (looks like this). It may end up going to these guys.

So now that the window trim is back, it still needs staining, varnishing and then adding back to the window frame. And of course I need to put back the window I took out in the first place, replace the ropes with chains and add brass weather stripping. It sounds like a lot more work than it is, I hope. I'd post pictures, but several weeks back our digital camera met the ground a tad bit forcefully (dropping will do that) and now it's being repaired.

We weathered through Halloween just fine. We decorated the house a little more than last year and we were again asked about the ghost in the attic. My wife had a prime opportunity to perpetuate the myth, but missed it. She had been putting a strobe light in the attic on some nights to create a "spooky" light in the attic. When one of the neighbors commented that it looked creepy, the wife said thanks. I would have looked at them and told them, "What light? What are you talking about?" Ah well. Maybe next year.

We also caught mouse 55. So Great Stuff foam and I have been busy filling anything that even looks like a hole in the basement. I found several that I had missed last year, including two holes, one inch in diameter left over from when we upgraded our electrical service in 2007. From a mouse's perspective, all that was missing was a porch light and a little mat that said WELCOME!