...This Week...
...the Man got the new "temporary" lights installed a few inches above the old ones...
...and that leaves the lovely holes for me to patch...haha...
...we replaced the downstairs hallway toilet...and donated the old one...
...now we have a nice new chair height toilet...that flushes quietly and doesn't run all the time...
...not really a new house thing...but I got a new office chair...
...I love it...and I love that it's white...but apparently being white made it be half the price of the brown and black versions for some reason...
...we put one of those heat sheild thing-ys in the attic opening...
...and I fixed a sprinkler head that was not working correctly...just dug around it and unscrewed it and put in the replacement...I think the sprinkler system will need some more work this spring...
...now back to the past...this was a HUGE job that I was defnitely not looking forward to...
...so the very first thing I did was to cover everything with plastic as best as I could...
...as this is going to be a very messy job...
...I was trying to make a sort of tent to work in...
...the stair rails in the big room were a sort of darkish orange colour...they are stained oak...
...this is kind of a before photo...for colour reference...see how dark the post is compared to the newly refinished stairs...which were basically the same colour...
...so we got some Citrus-Strip...we've never used this product before...but it has some good reviews...
....and I sort of slathered that on the post...
...and the top rail...
...and covered it all with plastic to let it do it's work...
...and it was a gelled goopy mess when it was uncovered...I just scraped it off as best as I could...
...this is what it looks like after scraping off the goop...
...still not very nice...so there will be quite a bit of sanding involved as well...
...so this is the post stripped and the rail not...
...and the next day...I moved on to the lower rail...that bottom post inside all of the spindles is almost impossible to reach...
...but I got everything coated...
...and wrapped in plastic...
...the product is not very stinky either...like a lot of stripping products that you really wouldn't want to use inside your house at all...
...and again...left it to do its stripping...
...and then it was time to pull away the plastic...and scrape off all the glue-y goop...
...and then I used some mineral spirits and a BUNCH of rags to wipe away all of that residue...but if I took any photos of that piece of the project I can't find them now...
...but this is a photo of the bottom post after stripping and being wiped down with the mineral spirits...but before sanding...
...and then it was time to sand everything...so I made a couple of sanding tools...I took some double sided tape and attached some sandpaper to a paint stick...
...to get in between the spindles on the underside...very very tedious...
...and then I took some duct tape...and stuck some sandpaper to that...and the white part is the little handle piece I left so I could grip it easier...
...and this 'tool' wraps around the posts...and I pull back and forth on it...it does an amazing job of sanding the posts...especially that one in the little circle of spindles...
...and after I made sure that my 'tent' was secure...I got out the power tools...
...to sand whatever I could reach with the sanders...
...but even with the power sanders...there's a lot of detail work with the little ridge under the handrail...
...I sanded the flat parts of the post with the power sander...
...and the round part with my pull back and forth strip sander...
...the post sanded and the rails not...
...mid sanding on the rail...you can really see the colour difference here...
...and that whorl at the end is IMPOSSIBLE...such a tight small space to sand on the inside of the circle...
...see what I mean...
...the curved outside bit it not too bad...
...but the inside and the post require a lot of knuckle bangs...
...the sandpaper on a strip was a real lifesaver...
...it's pretty worn out now...but easy to make a new one...
...the power sanders worked really well on the straight horizontal pieces...
...and then just wiping everything down with a damp rag to see where we are...I'm liking the colour a lot better now...
...the finished (still unfinished (with poly)) upper rail...
...and we used the same non-yellowing German clear finish that we'd used on the hardwood floors...
...it was a project that spanned many days...but we're really happy with how it turned out...
~Have a lovely day!
Oh my goodness that was a tedious project!!! I'm tired just reading about it... Love, K
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