Unhinged!

Anvil at Emo's next Monday! Heavy Metal heaven!

I am happy to announce more progress on our office overhaul. After Dan got 30 layers of paint off the doors, and after I got those same layers off the doorway moulding and baseboards it was time to think about re-hanging the doors. And what better to use than the original hinges? They are perfectly good, and original so already fit the existing screw holes and cuts. No need to patch or fill old holes!

However, and of course, there was a problem: just like the doors and moulding, the hinges were covered with 30 layers of paint. It had to come off. We could have bought new one's but we would rather reuse what we have, and at 10 bucks per new hinge why spend the money? Instead, we spent 8 bucks on a can of paint stripper, soaked the 4 hinges in the stuff, and scraped off all those old layers of paint.


Please note - a person should always wear rubber gloves when using paint stripper. If it can dissolve paint it can certainly dissolve skin, so be careful with this toxic chemical! I learned a little something about rubber gloves: when using paint stripper wear chemical resistant gloves! I am serious! The paint stripper totally ate holes in my regular rubber gloves which I painfully discovered when the gloves bubbled up and corroded in front of my eyes, while still on my hands, and I got that stinging, icy, burning sensation from the stripper. After removing the now useless gloves and washing my hands really well with soap and water I switched to chemical resistant gloves for the rest of the job. You do not want this crap on your skin.

The paint stripper worked really well to break down the paint. I scrubbed the hinges with a wire brush and hit them with a bit of steel wool leaving them clean and paint free. I did get new screws : 1 inch #10's, because even though I am pretty cheap thrifty and like to reuse stuff I was not about to strip the paint off all those old screws.


Now, this little project would never have had to happen if some previous occupant of our house had not painted over the hinges in the first place. Do yourself a favor: when painting a door don't paint the hinges! Take a couple of minutes and remove them first. Your welcome.

I like to paint doors while they're hanging because I can paint both sides at the same time. If you paint a door while it's laying on top of a table, for instance, you can only paint one side at a time, then you have to wait for it to dry, turn it over and paint the other side, and if you have to do 2 coats it takes even longer. When you paint a door while it's hanging you cut your paint time in half. But first, I always paint the door jam and the edge of the door where the hinges screw in so I can hang the door and not have to fool around with taping off the hinges and painting around them. See this picture, below, of the painted door edge before applying the hinges. Also notice how Dan got that door all the way down to bare wood (!!!) by stripping and sanding with a belt sander. The doors look great!




And here is a picture of the door jam hinge, all ready to go. Fits perfectly.


So, the doors are hung and ready to paint! Yippee!

Here are a few more pictures, below, of the paint stripper in action on the office windows. I removed as much paint with the heat gun as I could, but I didn't want to get too close to the glass with a 4 million degree heat gun blast (it would be just my luck that the windows would crack), so I used stripper on the sashes where the window glass sits.

Coming Up: The old leaky ceiling problem!