Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Decking Day

Today was a decking day. A day where I wrestled with wood that really means me no harm, but is causing me some anyway. I'm stripping down the decking and planning to stain the lovely natural wood a nice colour and leave it like that. Presently it is a nasty blue colour, who knows what the previous tenants were thinking?

Anyway, I went to my local hardware store and was assured by a too-young-to-know man that this large plastic container of acidic stuff would strip off all my nasty latex paint in no time. The instructions seem to go along with this, reading, 'Leave to soak for 15 minutes and then rub gently with a brush, the paint will come off.' Hmm.

Well, surprise, surprise, the paint doesn't come off. Some of it does, after heartbreaking rubbing, scraping and hosing (for hours), and reveals the coat of nasty yellow paint under the blue. The reasoning behind painting the thing blue becomes clearer now.

So, I would just use a large sander to buzz the whole thing clean and nice, and I will do that, but the planking is about half an inch apart all the way across, so there is paint in the gaps which would look terrible if I didn't remove it. This is why I bought the paint stripper, I thought it would help (my father suggested that it would).

Now, one eighth of the decking is semi-stripped and displays blue, orange and wood. The sides, the inaccessible sides, display the same levels of paint.

Oh, strength, do not desert me.

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