One of these things..

.. is not like the others..



That would the entrance to the dining room from the kitchen. It turns out that the trim around that door was white, grey, peach, white again, off-white, white another time and pr'bly a few other colors thrown in for good measure over the course of the last mumbletysome years. And while I can understand not scraping down your *walls* every time you repaint them, why would you not in any of that time think that it might, oh, I don't know look better if you scraped the old (flaking, chipping) paint off the *trim* before applying the new paint?

This does not even begin to address why *some*one in the last mumbletysome years didn't want to restore the trim to it's natural wood so it would, oh, I don't know, match the rest of the woodwork in the house. *sigh* Fortunately, the wood underneath all that paint is beautiful. Unfortunately, there's the rest of this door frame, a single window frame, and another door frame (and a door, but that might just get full out replaced) in the kitchen like this, and a single window frame, a medicine cabinet frame, and another door frame (and another door, which again might just get full out replaced) in the upstairs bathroom still to do.

The above was the results of I think four or five coats of orange stripper stuff. We're going to try a heat gun on the rest because while the stripper isn't difficult, nor likely to be any less of a mess than a heat gun, a heat gun will hopefully be faster and cheaper. The stripper needs to sit for at least an hour before you can strip it off again, so now you know what I did today.

Yesterday was largely this..



Those are the two dining room windows, which were darker before, but now have mumbletysome years old varnish removed so now you can see the wood grain and not the cracks and slubs in the mumbletysome years old varnish. Mumbletysome years old varnish turns to sludge when you put in the stripper stuff, which isn't bad, just.. messy. But a heat gun is not an option on this woodwork (which, as I mentioned, other than the kitchen & upstairs bathroom, is the most of the rest of the house, including the stairs and the eight inch baseboard trim around every room), so there will still be lots more orange stripping stuff in my future.

The windows still need to be sanded and we have to decide if we want to just poly over them as they are now and try to match the unfinished doorway into the laundry room to them, or restain them and try to match the unfinished doorway stain to the new stain. But that will be decided later. Because I still need to strip the baseboard and the entry to the living room, which leads to doing the living room baseboard and windows, which lead to doing the stairs (because the baseboard runs into the stairs, which are framed in matching trim). So it's unlikely we'll get to the actual finishing of this re-finishing project for quite some time.

But at least now it's started. And that is a Good Day's Work(tm).