Mister Angry-Face Door

We're updating the trim on the third floor, which involves a lot of woodwork, painting, nails, and dust. One of the many chores involves stripping the old paint off of Kathy's door, which may have had about 100 coats of paint on it.

Rather than add a 101st coat, we decided to strip off the old paint, so we took the door outside to work on it. Pro Tip: It's hard to move a door down three flights of stairs. For starters, doors don't always fit through doorways. Makes sense, I know, but you don't think of that until it's too late. We often had to turn the door sideways to fit it through.

Stripping the old paint was more work than I expected (naturally). It doesn't just magically fall off. What I anticipated to be a few hours' work instead took two full days. There was a *lot* of paint on that door, and it didn't all want to come off. I counted about six colors before I gave up and called it "good enough."

Interestingly, the oldest coats of paint were the hardest to remove. Maybe that's because they used better-quality paint back in the day, or maybe it's because it was oil-based instead of latex, or maybe it's just been on there so long that it doesn't want to come off. Whatever the reason, the last few coats are still there; they're not coming off. No amount of paint stripper would remove them, so I just sanded them smooth instead. Let's call it primer.

Complicating the issue was the detail work on the door. This is the same pattern that appears on most of our doors, and it involves lots of fiddly little grooves that aren't easy to scrape or clean. It's hard to scrape off the paint without gouging the woodwork, so patience is important. Patience and sandpaper. Lots of sandpaper.

Ultimately, I got it to the state you see here. It's not perfect, but it should hold a coat of paint without looking too bad.

I decided -- too late -- to put on a dust mask while I was scraping off all this old paint. I suspect most of the paint was lead-based, and my throat feels kinda funny now, but oh, well.

Tell me what you see, but I count more than six layers of paint here. There's the white top coat, then the red underneath that, then the green, then another coat of white, then the brown, then a lighter shade of brown, and then... who knows. I do know there's a yellowish layer underneath that I never did remove, so that makes at least seven. For the record, we're painting the door white. We'll post pictures when it's all done.