Outside Updates

My time this week went to some much needed filing, not to stuff you’d want to read about. But I did do something with the front of my house. I stuck my head out the window.

That’s not much, but I haven’t looked too closely at the upper half of the brick what with a 13-foot-wide awning running across the first floor. And I picked some of the paint off with my fingers. It’s looking like a lot of the red paint, maybe half, is looser than I thought. (While we’re here we can also admire the workmanship of the Irishman’s aluminum siding, neatly scribed to fit the architectural details it’s covering.)

And let’s take a closer look at the part I attempted to strip in Fall 2016. The paint here was loose so I knocked some of it off, but the stripper didn’t even soften it. To get it cleaner than this would require either an aggressive, high-pressure power washing that would damage the brick… or a different paint stripper that works on whatever kind of paint this is.

What I showed you before was more successful than the upper area because the solvent based stripper that I was using is effective on the weird brown bituminous coating that is under the bottom 3 feet of the brick.

So the next step is clear. I’m going to need to try another paint stripper. Prosoco, the manufacturer I used before, has a sales rep who actually talked on the phone with me about this project, which was really nice. He said I should keep using the “fast acting” stripper on the bitumen and try the “heavy duty” stripper on the rest. This next product is caustic, so it should work differently than the solvent based stripper I already have. I was intimidated by it before because you have to follow it up with an acidic after wash to remove the highly alkaline residue from the end product. But I’m over being worried about that now because I’m too vain to leave things this shabby and too poor to hire someone else to do it.

The caustic stripper has another benefit: apparently it is good for breaking up carbon crust. And I live like a mile from an oil refinery emitting 10,000 times the industry median pollution, so there is carbon crust. (Side note: ask me if the 800 good blue collar jobs that oil refinery creates are worth the enormous breaks it gets on taxes and already-lax environmental and safety standards.)

So, this summer I’ll be starting a new ritual. The caustic stripper will go onto the house while the sun is setting. I’ll let it work overnight and wash it off in the morning before the afternoon sun hits it and dries it up. I’ll probably let the ladder squat in the alley with a bike lock on it because I DO NOT want to store a ladder that possibly has paint stripper on it in my living room. The bitumen softens just minutes after I put stripper on it, so if I finish the single application of caustic stripper with time to spare I can hit that part of the brick once or 5 times.

Once this is done, I’ll still need to figure out pointing and repairs to the brick, restoring the surviving original wood, possibly bleaching the marble, and replacing the windows. We’re figuring all of this out as we go along. It doesn’t look like I’ll be going to brunch very often this summer. But I have renewed hope that the brick might come clean enough to leave unpainted.