The home contained a lot of metal that had been painted over. The most darling of these are the vent covers that go on the fireplace. They were painted dark pink.
Working with paint remover is tough. It smells bad, it doesn’t all come off at once, and you certainly don’t want to get it on your skin. It’s also a lot more expensive than I remembered.
I believe I tried using a brush, and an old toothbrush & putty knife won out. A pile of paper towel or disposable rags was also very handy - the paint turns into the equivalent of wet bubble gum, smearing the paint when you try to move it. The longer you leave the stripper on, the better it will go. One thing about working with this stuff - if you left anything inside, gotta somehow get the gloves off before you touch the door handle! Or hang onto a clean rag while doing so. Also get the hair back and try not to have any itches.
That piece of pink carpet was left in the basement. All the rooms in the house used to be coated in pink fluff. Here’s how the fireplace vents look now:
Still not exactly sure how these vents work; I think they end up in the basement. The fireplace is not in use because the chimney was used to vent the gas furnace.
The hallway lights had also been painted over and I was determined to get them to bare metal as well.
The lights in the kitchen are known as ‘boob lights’. We might end up replacing some of them but for now I just cleaned them up by painting them. They were silver, now, oil rubbed bronze!
You can get oil rubbed bronze spray paint at any hardware store. To keep from getting paint all over the areas where the lightbulbs attached, I used a lot of plastic and painters tape. Some still got through but you don’t see that part of the light anyway.
One more fixture we refinished are the old vents to the basement. They’re of no functional use but they are kind of cool looking for the period, so we decided to take them to Mt Baker Powder Coating. I don’t have any great pictures of ‘before’ - here are some where the vent shows up. Would have been too much work to strip.
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