Almost Done With Guest Room

It feels like we're getting close on our guest bedroom paint stripping project, so we've been pretty good about working on it. The rainy, cool weather has helped as well, because, really, who wants to hang out with a heat gun when it's already too hot?

Unfortunately, with paint stripping, the heat gun stripping takes off about 95% of the paint but seems to take only about half of the total time. Removing the last 5% seems to take just about as long. (This is an educated guess on my part—I haven't carefully measured our hours and effort and calculated the real percentages.)

I spent several more hours today working on the guest room detail work. I also got sidetracked scraping some of the thick skin off the plaster walls. It's pretty easy to remove once you get it started. I probably don't need to scrape the walls, but I am a little worried the plaster contractor will just plaster over this layer and I'd rather have it removed first.

I'm just about ready to declare the guest bedroom woodwork done enough for sanding. There are quite a few areas where I've been trying to dig paint out of crevices, but there's just too much gap between the pieces of wood and my digging is causing damage. I think it's better in those cases to just touch up any paint showing through the stain. We've already got matching paint so it should be a breeze.

Jeff also made more progress stripping paint with the heat gun in the hallway. (As tempting as it is, we're not going to turn the corner on the stairs and do the lower portion.) The goal this summer is to finish the upstairs landing so we can have the floors refinished up there in both the master and guest bedrooms and the hallway connecting them. The stairs are a project for 2013.

I also managed to get Jeff's help to rehang all three doors in the master bedroom. My plan is to stain them while they're hung so I can stain both sides at the same time.  I'm hoping now that they're hung I'll just wake up some morning soon feeling like finishing that bedroom. (A girl can hope, right?)