Engineer by Day, Stripper by Night

Well I never thought it would come to this, but I'm stripping trim by night. I always figured it would just be fine as-is, but once I got down to it, it seemed better to strip than to sand and scrape. I'm sure Andy will cry when he sees all this beautiful paint coming off.

This is the trim that we removed from our first floor when we gutted the walls. It has generally lived with the flooring since then. We replaced windows and never decided whether to refinish the old trim or buy new but now the time has come and we are trying to salvage most of it.I'm still not sure if we will end up with boards nice enough to stain and finish or whether we will be re-painting. Either way, they need to be stripped. I thought it would be easy, but it turns out there is some work involved.

I have trim laid out for three windows and five doors. We will need to add a couple pieces since our door and window sizes changed somewhat.

The door and window trim might not get installed along with the flooring, but we will install baseboard. After assessing the state of our baseboard, we ended up with only about half of what we needed and a lot of small pieces. Thanks to a local millworks that had previously run a batch close to our profile, we were able to get some new boards. These are just over 7 inches tall - not much chance of finding that at your local home improvement center.

The trim is all pine and the flooring is hard maple, as it was originally.