There's Nothing More Annoying Than The Self-Satisfaction Of Someone Who Peels Paint Off A Bannister

Heading into July, we were down to the last of the major items on the to-do list: Painting the cabinets, taking the tiles up on the second floor and stripping the paint off the staircase. This was the long July-August of buckling down and finishing what needed to be finished.

The previous owner of Kawama was intent on covering up every floor surface. We already talked about the carpet, for example. The man taking care of the house had told us that the owner wanted to "protect the floors." For what, I don't know, perhaps just future owners.

The other coverup method they used were those horrible self-stick vinyl tiles:

And then there was the strangest coverup of them all — the sickly orange paint on the tile in the kitchen:

Jen got a heat gun to use to take up the tiles. A heat gun is a great tool. It takes up these tiles, no problem, but it also takes off paint, which also came in handy, especially after Jen forbade me from using chemicals to strip the paint on the staircase.

Heating up the tiles and melting away the adhesive was no problem at all:

What was a problem was getting the adhesive residue off the floor afterward. I tried vegetable oil and 409 and neither of those things were working. Someone Jen knows gave us a tip to using washing soda, which is sort of like baking soda but stronger. That did work, though it also took off whatever finish was leftover:

Cleaning the floors of the adhesive was good, important work, but very tedious. I think it took about a week, though I can't really remember after all the beer I drank to break up the day. I'd walk Jen to the subway, pick up a six pack and get to work.

(I did take the day off on July 21. At one point during the day I checked weather.com and saw that it was 91 with a dew point of 74 degrees. Holy shit that was hot. I emailed Threshold in DC to tell her it was 94 there with "an excruciatingly high" dew point of 78. She confirmed that it was, in fact, very hot.)

Scrub, scrub, scrubbing was quiet, as opposed to the heat gun. When the heat gun is on, you're stuck in your head. At least when I was scrubbing I could hear the radio, which sent me on a different tangent in which I'd think about something along the lines of how the musicians on the radio weren't on their knees on the floor just then making their wrists sore and their knuckles soap-raw.

Other times I'd think of things I'd want to Google but couldn't because the clicker was downstairs and, besides, my hands were sticky with glue or wet from soap or just soapy.

After a week or so of scrubbing the floors with washing soda, here is what my pants and shoes looked like (my family has since forced me to throw away these shoes):

But the nice thing about having washing soda caked on your clothes is that they ended up pretty clean:

Then there was the staircase. I had been dreading taking the paint off the staircase, but it needed to happen, especially because once we took up the carpet there was a different color paint underneath.

The only thing with the staircase was, like I said, Jen wouldn't let me use chemical strippers on account of the fetus. So I used the heat gun instead. Even with the respirator it was still pretty stinky, and I couldn't imagine that heating up old paint — some of it perhaps lead paint, though I wasn't sure — was any better.

Once you get going with the heat gun, it's difficult to stop — both because the paint just starts peeling away and because you just want to peel back all those years of paint on the molding:

What goes through your mind while you heat up paint all day? I don't know. Stuff that makes you feel small. What people you went to school with are doing now. Whether your eighth grade English teacher was yanking your chain when she said you should write more. What Steve Albini is cooking. It goes on from there.

Eventually I found a place to stop, and settled on just the staircase.

Jen and I have a word for when things look good enough, which is "rustic." The stairs and the floors weren't perfect in the sense that they are now sanded, stained and finished (I can't even imagine that process, especially now that we've squirreled away all our stuff) but now they looked good enough:

There's something big and self-congratulatory about "peeling away." It's the kind of feeling you get when you sit through a literature segment in the second half of The News Hour, or force yourself to read the business section, or something like that. You sit down at dinner and repeat something about the Bolivia's deficit or Orhan Pamuk and just feel like you've "earned it." In same same way it's like, "I spent the last three days rescuing the bannister — they sure don't make wood like they used to!"

But just when you feel high and mighty about righting a home decor wrong (like self-stick vinyl tiles), there's all the stuff you yourself are determined to cover up. The horrible laminate on the cabinets, for one:

And the longer I looked at it, the less happy I felt about the idea of wood laminate some of the kitchen walls:

Yeah, you're into "authentic" touches? What's more authentic than sallow grey fake wood laminate?

Some things are just self-evident.

I was skeptical about whether this would work, but Jen looked it up online and found that you actually can paint laminate. So we bought the Zinsser primer they talk about and I set about taking off all the doors, pulls and hinges. I would have just replaced the hinges but do you realize how much those damn things are? Like $2 or $3 a hinge! So we spray painted them. (Pulls are a different story — we bought plain ones at IKEA for nothing.) The Zinsser stuff is nasty smelling, but it works. We then painted over the primer with some color called something like "Yellowstone" or something like that and put everything back on.

A few weeks later I looked at the fake wood laminate and realized that it had to be covered, too. It was either that or pull it down, and I didn't think it was wise to roll the dice there.

So some stuff they covered up, and some stuff we covered up. Not the best moment for transparency, I suppose, though I am happy with the results . . . the before, to refresh your memory:

Then after:

And after this stuff was done, we started to see the end of the work on Kawama.

Posted: February 12th, 2012 | Author: Scott | Filed under: The Cult Of Domesticity | Tags: An Endorsement Of Zinsser B-I-N, How To Make Laminate Look A Lot Less Shitty, Kawama, Let's Get Small, The Caustic Nature Of Washing Soda, The Dew Point, The Heat Gun, The Miracle Of Washing Soda, The Sin Of Self-Stick Vinyl Tiles

---