Turning a Corner With Stripping

I’ve been in the habit of doing one task at a time to the whole house. This made sense when I was trying to be ready for ALL the plumbing, wiring, insulation contracting, drywall finishing, and floor finishing at once to get better prices from tradesmen. It made less sense when I decided to go over the whole house with paint stripper to get the worst off, then come back through to get the last stubborn bits. It made the house look disgusting. Neighbors complimented the job I was doing thinking that the parts I hadn’t started were the after. And it made it hard to know exactly where how much more of this job I had left to do. So this weekend I switched to getting one patch at a time as clean as possible and I feel SO much better that more than half of the facade is looking decent! I’m almost done up to the second floor windowsills. Almost.

At this rate it might take me through July 1 to finish the job. But I can live with that, especially now that it’s not a completely disgusting eyesore in the meantime. Of course, if  I knew the Office of Property Assessment were sending someone to walk buy I’d want to get all the paint peeling STAT. That would get me a discount on my property taxes for having a house in “below average” condition for a few years.

But anyway, we can’t plan around that, and if they catch on that I get it pristine and tax me $2000 a year that’s the breaks. This city needs money.

But back to the brick. I’m consistently getting the paint off the bricks themselves, but sometimes it stubbornly remains in the mortar joints. I can live with this because the joints are supposed to be red anyway.

What I can’t live with is these stupid painted-on white lines. And to my dismay, I found them painted on again UNDER the red paint! They’re more obvious in some places than others. Note here that sometimes there appear to be multiple coats of them visible and not always in the same place.

The good news is I’m reclassifying the paint the brick option from “probably not” to “definitely not.” I’ll be going over what you see above with the solvent based stripper one more time to get those last stubborn bits of paint. After that, I have a theory that the white lines that remain are oil based paint that will come off with the scary caustic stripper. Since I was going to use a caustic cleaner to brighten up the pollution stains at the end anyway, I’m now going to get the evil red paint as far off as I can from the whole facade, all of it. Then I’ll clean the whole facade, all of it, with the caustic stripper to brighten it up. I learned my lesson though. Next time I work with that I’ll wear a hard hat.

Then there’s the marble. It has unattractive grey and nicotine-yellow-brown stains, but they seem to be very slowly dissolving as the solvent based stripper washes over them. Also note that to the far right of this windowsill I did a bad thing and blasted the smoothness off of the marble by holding the power washer too close. I feel guilty, but I’m probably still being gentler than a pro would.

So, you get an idea of what color the brick and marble will be eventually. Next time I’ll share some paint color ideas, but for now, what do you think I should do?