Weekend Plans

Unlike many people who will spend this Holiday weekend on trips or relaxing by the pool, we will have a full on house weekend - Its looks like we are going to be having the house apprised soon and so we need to take care of a few...ahem details to make things look presentable - after living so long with odd little unfurnished projects we have become a little blinded, so tonight is the non rose colored glasses night - So far, the list includes:

1. Fix the hallway wall so it aligns correctly ( will involve a jack and some wood)
2. Replacing the hardwood floor in the hallway ( have vintage oak flooring in the basement for this project)
3. Paint the front porch and column bases (The cement cap project will continue.....)
4. Replace the baseboard in the bathroom that is too short since we replaced the sink cabinet.
5. Install trim around the tub enclosure that has been on the to do list since we moved in...
6. Fix the hole in the wall I made when I decided to wiggle a loose pipe in the basement, which caused it to break through the wall, I suspect it was to the original 1910 wall mounted water heater)
7. Replace a few of the peel and stick floor tiles in the kitchen that have slipped (That's what happens when you stick them on top of the old linoleum... and I will admit that was my doing, since we are planning to replace the the whole thing with tile at some future date and I was not in the mood at the time to peel up the linoleum)

Hopefully that will do the trick for now - we will see what we can get done!

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...