Stripping Again....

One of the main projects I did when we were redoing the Long Beach house was to strip all of the paint off the woodwork in the entire house - Luckily, the original concrete porch pillar bases were never painted so I didn't have to worry about those... here in San Diego, a number of @#$%^ painted the cement and brick bases...repeatedly. What happens when you paint cement not very well? It chips.... then it gets painted again, and chips in a different spot, so after 60+ years of this ugly cycle, you get a bumpy mess...
So how does one go about stripping paint off cement? A google search basically came up with what I suspected - do it the same way you do wood trim.. paint Remover and lots of elbow grease... I decided to experiment a bit and used my trusty heat gun to get some of the paint off, since I didn't know if the cement would absorb the heat and the paint wouldn't get hot enough to soften.. Low and behold, it actually worked and I got about 95% of the paint off, I am going to go over it with paint remover to get the other 5% off, which as experience has taught, will be most of the work. The nice part about this is that once the paint is off, it will again be a zero maintenance surface.... The next project has also come into focus, which is the wood columns, there is a bit of rot, the wood trim around the base of the columns are missing, and a section of the column cap was chopped out when the porch was enclosed... I have a feeling this little side project will keep me busy for awhile...