I was so thrilled about how nice the windows looked in the downstairs stairwell after I cleaned the paint stripper off them, I decided to do the same in my office today. Imagine my dismay when one particular pane did not clean up, and instead even got worse! I was completely baffled. It was as if the goo smeared all over it had mysteriously become hard as diamond when all the other panes cleaned up just as easy as that other window had. WTF??



Well, I showed this to my Spouse and he took one look at it and said, "it's not glass, it's Lucite". Ehhhhhhh? I tapped my finger on each pane and they sounded exactly the same. They even looked the same, in the middles anyway. I'd been looking at these windows for 2.5 solid years and never saw the one as different than the others. Then, to prove it, he took his keys out and tapped on each pane with the metal keys. The dirty one made a conspicuously dull "thud" compared to the other two. D'OH!!! You can't slip one past an engineer! LOL. It will remain like that for now, but ultimately I will have to replace that piece... preferably with a nice piece of glass.



Speaking of the stairwell I have the new door nearly completely stripped now. It matches the trim woodwork perfectly, as if it was always there! Oddly enough it has a powerful scent of pine unlike any of the other wood I stripped. I don't know if it's just a slightly different species, or if the wood is newer, or was preserved differently, or what. When the doors have all been shut up and you first walk in there, the alcoholy piney scent is about enough to knock ya out. Whew!

Got some more paint scraping done in the upper stairwell. I did the top half of the door -- it looks like it was made to go there hehe. The blue line to the right is to protect the previously-bared wood when the second coat of yellow paint is put on the walls.



Once it is completely scraped, I can pull it out of the doorway and scrape the right-hand edge, then laminate more wood onto that so that the door can be made to exactly fit this doorway. That will make it possible to mount it on its hinges instead of having it held in with wedges. One time there was a terrific gust of wind and it popped the door off the wedges so it came crashing down. Boy did that make us all jump :D



The window that had been partially scraped before is now completely scraped. It looks great! The following day, I also washed all the Zip Strip gack off the glass and for the first time in weeks you could see through the window really well. Progress has been made! w00T!

I'd been putting off cleaning this pair of old oil lamps for... years. In fact it has probably been decades, although I didn't personally own them that whole time! Finally I got around to it and it ended up taking all day. I soaked the glass parts in hot soapy water and came by once an hour or so to scrub them again. Mainly it was the inside that was toughest -- where old yellowed fuel had left sediments. I stuffed a white washrag inside and used a knife to manipulate it to scrub the indentations inside. Luckily while it took a long time, noticeable progress occurred each iteration so it wasn't frustrating at all.



What really took the elbow grease was polishing the brass. All parts had a very thick black coating, or greasy dark brown dots that took several polishings to remove. I thought I did a pretty good job but as I look at this picture I realize I missed the lowest part on the left hand one. LOL... I'll have to catch that separately I guess! I put in new wicks, but not fuel as these ones are just for emergencies. We have fuel for them in the basement.



Here's the one we use regularly, as erm... hehe... "mood lighting". It's way newer and we inherited it from the previous owners when we moved into our house in Colorado. The frosted glass shade (found separately on eBay) is real nice on the eyes. I cleaned this one out the same day as the other two but it didn't need as much. I noticed the brass on this one had way less copper in it than that of the others. Sign of the times I guess. They sell fuel for these for very cheap at WalMart. They also have scent oil you can put in. I think you are supposed to burn the scent oil directly but it comes in very small bottles so we add 2 bottles of that and fill the rest up with regular lamp kerosene to save loot. Mainly what the scent does is prevents kerosene stench from gassing the room after you blow the lamp out at night. LOL. So worth it!

I am pleased to report further progress on scraping the paint on the trim in my office. The windows are definitely the most difficult part left and those are now 1/3 done:



It looks like about half-done in this picture, but in reality the inner parts take a lot more work than the wide outer parts. The inner part of the left window is about half-done and the right hand one has not been touched yet. Like the rest of the woodwork in this office, the windows have about 5 layers of old paint on them... purple-pink over paler pink over 3 shades of greenish brownish. The shelf underneath is unfinished pine, something I built long ago when I was still living in apartments and moving around all the time. I had been holding off on staining or painting it until I found out where I was going to live long-term. When I stain this office woodwork, this shelf will finally be stained to match! :)



Here's a closeup of the inner part being scraped. You can click on the picture if you really need the gory details. There are a lot of layers and crevices. I am not scraping the trough where the weight ropes are because my intention was to paint that a more saturated green color that goes with the walls and complements the golden brown that the woodwork will be. For this purpose I've selected a Dutch Boy G026 sample. 



Here is the sample shown with the wall green behind it, and my wood stain practice piece underneath. The practice piece, upon which I perfected how I was going to stain the woodwork to get the effect I wanted, has really come in handy for figuring stuff out color wise.



In other office news, I finished the 2nd closet door and put its hardware back on and remounted it for the time being. While it was off it "fell over" 2-3 times which I think may have been cat related. Oddly enough no cats were to be seen nearby after the loud crash of the it hitting the floor. But I still have my suspicions!

Today I sanded and painted the lower stairwell yellow. It needed to be sanded because there were a lot of plaster repairs from old hooks and nails that had been removed, as well as cracks in the walls and chunks taken out by people trying to get big stuff up and down the stairs. I don't include any pictures because they would have been pretty similar to those shown yesterday of the upstairs stairwell, down to the dark gray ceiling and running out of yellow paint before it was done.

Note to self: buy 2 more gallons of yellow paint.

There is a nice light fixture for the back stairs too, of the antique three-chain hanging bowl design. It's probably a decade or three earlier design than this house, but I like them a lot and have some for other parts of the house as well. The glass part is tan with gleaming clear glass wheat. Very handsome and dignified. I'll be sure to show pictures when I finally get it up, but first the old tin base I got for it needs to be painted. Oh, and the ceiling should probably be painted white also. Le sigh! At least it's only about a 4' x 4' ceiling on that landing.

I suppose this might seem odd to some people but I consider the stairs to the 2nd floor and the stairs to the basement to be all the same project. I guess they feel like the same stairwell to me even if they are not physically connected, just one above the other. At any rate I have been working on them both about equally. 

Here is a door I am working on fitting between the living room/upstairs stairwell and the upper end of the server room. It should allow light and a view in both directions while also providing a "cat-proof seal". As with the other server room door way I was working on in a previous post, this had a hollow core sliding door that was truly ugly. My intention here is to strip all the wood and stain it amber color. You can see what the heart pine looks like mostly-stripped if you look at the window area and the right hand doorframe in all of these pictures.



After the door has been fitted properly I'll take it elsewhere to be stripped. I have found the doors are really much easier to strip when lying horizontally on the floor with all their hardware removed!

This door mostly fits really well but there are gaps at the upper right where the door or the frame are not square:



For the right hand side my intention is to laminate another piece of heart pine to the right hand edge, and cut the extended door to match the opening shape. As for the top, since there is a fairly narrow opening at the bottom I will likely just cut off the top of the door as-is to make it match the top of the frame better. Here's the other side of the top:



With the left hand side butted up it's clear there's just this small gap at the top. Once it's cut off the whole door can slide up a little and fill it. Since I have to re mount hinges anyway this isn't going to add work or anything.



The bottom of the door. I think it'll look really nice when it's in. The steps on the left are the last 4 to be stripped; aside from the door frame shown, part of another door frame, and some of the window the entire rest of the stairwell is done. It was about a week and a half's work. I have a lot of pictures of that I'll probably post as an early dated post corresponding to when I did the actual job.

Today started out with a bang as I had run out of cat food and dog food simultaneously, so I had to get up and go to the store right away. Our "fur children" (heh) are used to a morning feeding. In addition to the grocery store I also hit The Wart and got myself some new tennis shoes (since mine were falling apart),  some gas lantern wick, and some supplies to build a "good job!" display for myself to ensure better compliance with my uh, exercise schedule. It has a calendar and stars to stick on the days I do what I am supposed to. LOL... the scary thing is, I actually do find it motivating.

Towards the middle of the day I threw another heap of wood down in the basement. But hmm... what's that? (See arrow below, pointing at a suspicious... item.. amongst the wood).



Upon closer inspection I discovered it was 4 bumblebees who appeared to be engaging in either an orgy, or some sort of very very friendly house-moving activities. The close-up below shows a huge specimen, the queen I suppose, with 3 smaller bumblebees riding on her back. The rearmost one is in a position where mating would be possible (I didn't inspect to see if they actually were, sorry) while the other two are farther up on her back. Whew, sounds like a good time but doing it in a woodpile seems like a good way to catch a few splinters if you ask me.



Here's the wood rack in the basement, with only about 1/6th of its capacity remaining:



This view of the woodpile from the kitchen window shows that it is barely depleted. It's almost laughing at me. Grr!



However, there are 5 days left to move the rest before the next load comes so I think I am right on schedule.

Well, it's getting late-ish so I'm off. :: waves ::