You're right, the well-ventilated house with all of the windows open and 80's punk and New Wave blaring from it can only mean one thing: I am back to stripping the wood in the bedroom!
Simple job. All I have left are the window heads and sills, apron, and cornice. Yeah, simple until I started actually stripping and found that these areas were once covered with something odd.
Am I crazy? Was all of the other wood stripping this difficult and I only fail to remember it because it was so long ago that I did any actual stripping? Are these pieces of wood abnormally dark or am I holding the Speedheater on the pieces a little too long?
Why the hell did I ever start stripping this wood in the first place? There are plenty of people, in fact most people in America, that get along just fine with crappy painted woodwork. Why couldn't I be one of those people? Why I couldn't I just go to Home Depot, pick out a stark white paint (or maybe settle for a nice light cream), and go on with a painted and sane, frustration-free, life? Nooooooo, I have to get all fancy and have natural woodwork and wood floors and earth-tone paints and la dee da dee da.
O.K. I think I got that out of my system.
I am not sure but I really think that something was initially applied to this part of the window trim that did not get applied anywhere else. The Speedheater is absolutely useless. O.K., maybe I am exaggerating because it got off the first 6 layers of paint. Unfortunately, it is not helping with the last two? I was at this small 6' section for over 5 hours. This is disheartening as I got the entire door frame (jambs & head) completed in the same amount of time. 
I am not sure what this will mean aesthetically for the head of the window when it is seen in relation to all of the other woodwork in the room but I will persist and hopefully no one will be the wiser when they look at the final product.
Don't forget: vote early and often (at least once daily) for "Pleasant Home" at Partners in Preservation !!!
The wood trim in our tiny transitional bungalow is not your typical flat-stock treatment found in most bungalows. I thought this was unique, kind of quant. The vertical jambs have that nice plain appearance and all of the door heads are capped with this fairly intricate molding. After a weekend of stripping this stuff, I now just think it is a pain in the ass. I guess I shouldn’t hate the molding – just the persons that painted it. 
It could be worse. When we were house-hunting, we had the opportunity to look at our neighbor’s home. Yes, two neighboring houses were for sale at the same time. I look back now and think that I don’t have it so bad. Every inch of woodwork in that home is painted the starkest white. If I recall correctly, the carpeting all matches it. 
I am going to persist over the next few weeks and will try and keep everyone up to date with the progress. It looks like I will need to do some chemical stripping - which is going to suck because I have now gotten used to just vacuming up all the stuff I strip. While this is going on, we are still fighting over paint colors for the walls and whether to stencil or not to stencil. We need to get a ceiling fan and eventually a rug too. Boy, I hope the bed doesn’t show up before we are finished.
