This week I convinced Karen to come down and help out with the prep in the cottage bedroom. The amount of scraping and stripping that has to occur is so time consuming so I figured I’d try to get a 2nd pair of hands to help. First we tried picked up some shiplap to test how that would look in the room.

There’s already furring strips in place so I was thinking of re-using those, but that would require running the shiplap perpendicular to the floor boards. So we try running the shiplap parallel and it looks OK, but would require removing the furring strips to nail directly into the ceiling joists.

We then try perpendicular and it actually looks better.

Maybe it’s the very small ceiling area, but it doesn’t seem to clash with the flow of the floor to go in the opposite direction. After we decide on that, back to work on stripping. We both use the infrared heat tools. Karen goes to the plaster walls to remove the latex paint to expose the calcimine paint below. Once she heats the latex paint with the infrared heater, it comes off in large sheets, but it’s still tedious work. Maybe not as tedious as me trying to heat off all of the white paint covering the woodwork. I get a pretty good amount off, but there’s little bits in the nooks and crannies that take hours of scraping with dental picks to get off. I try using the orange stripper, but Karen says she thinks the original shellac finish looks nice enough to keep.

So now the dilemma is trying to remove the paint without taking off all of the stain and shellac. Straight alcohol seems wrong because that takes off the shellac. Mineral spirits doesn’t seem to do anything. I tried Goof Off and that seems to work OK getting the paint off, but requires lots of elbow grease. I mix things up with using sandpaper, scouring pads and metal brushes. The brush seems to work best, but nothing is a homerun. To make matters tricky, a snowstorm hits the area and the cottage is unheated. The temperature dips to the teens so working in their is bitter cold. Luckily an infrared heater in the room keeps us warm enough, but there’s no way I’m going to be able to wash the calcimine off this weekend.