Sometimes renovating a house does feel like a trip to the gym. You can build up muscle, work out parts of your body you didn't know existed and certainly work on endurance!
One job which definitely requires endurance is restoring the stairs to their original state. They were covered in carpet when we got the house, but at some point they must have had just had a rug running down the middle of them because the sides were painted white. Unfortunately whatever paint was used at the time seems to be resistant to anything we could throw at it, e.g. it is happily defying the powers of a heat gun and paint stripper. Much to Esther's frustration who kindly spent a day discovering this fact. I think she definitely deserves the No 23 Endurance Award for her efforts.
So having discovered that melting or dissolving the paint is not going to work we borrowed a belt sander and bought a little sanding mouse for the corners instead. It's dusty business, but hey - I am determined to have beautiful wooden stairs and not cover them in carpet! So you see, the ash cloud over Europe is not really volcanic ash, it's actually saw dust from our house. Sorry Europe! ;o)
Sanding did get us a big step closer to the hoped for end result, but there are still edges and corners that can't be reached , so it's back to the paint stripper and a scalpel blade to remove the last remnants. More endurance required...
Before
Work in Progress
Heat Gun and Paint Stripper Experiment
Getting there
New landing
Way to go, superheroes. Moral support from Munich, Niklas
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