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Listening to George Orwell's 1984 while undercoating all the doorframes.
Tonight I lay down five wet pine doors on the floor of my hobby room to dry under weights that will stop them warping over the next few weeks.
The DIY that never seems to end, but it always looks good when it's done. A little lift, a nip and tuck here and there, and the house emerges slowly out from under 65 years of botching.
The wind has in finally dropped off from gale force and the hot air balloons are up. The neighbours are repairing fence posts, Martin is welding and I'm finishing of the third door frame. Stripping it that is. I haven't begun painting yet. I have never known three doorframes to take so long. Or given me so many burns. Look at this one - that's the biggest of them all and I did that within about an hour of starting this week.
The heat gun operates at 600 degrees so I'm sure you can imagine the yelp I let out. It's healing now thankfully and making my toes curl with desperation to itch it as the blister is drying out and coming off.
Fleagle just lies on her blankie, vaguely amused by it all.
Given the ridiculous weather lately, my usual week of annual leave that I schedule each spring to sort the garden out is being devoted to the house. Besides a touch of spring cleaning, which began last weekend with a complete turf out and deep clean of our bedroom, I have some jobs to finish off which I began before Christmas due to the impending carpet fitting.
Today I'm finishing stripping the doorframe to my hobby room, which only had the bottom of it done so the carpet could be fitted. Because it is metal, the job is going very slowly even with a stripper that belts out 600 degrees of heat. The 60 year old surface gloss paint isn't the problem. It's the first wood effect coating that was put on the doorframes when they were fitted, which was used to disguise the fact that Britain had no wood at the end of the World War II when this house was built and had to use metal for doorframes instead. I think glue was used and it is not melting properly, just burning to black sticky lumps. Yeuch.
Once the bulk of paint is off, I'll go over the frames with paint stripper and wire wool, then white spirit as a final clean. Then I'll do 2-3 thin coats of oil-based metal primer and a couple of coats of matt white metal paint.
At the same time I'm doing this, I'll also be finishing off the doorframes to the living room and kitchen, which have also been partially stripped. Then I can paint all three at the same time one after the other. It will take me the better part of the week to do all of them. That leaves me with only two doorframes left to do in the whole house - the downstairs bathroom one and the door between the back and front of the house.
At some point in the week five original 1940s doors from the house are going to be stripped so I can do the same to them as I did to the bedroom doors last year (see below) but they have to dry out for a few weeks when they come back, so the sanding and varnishing of them is a job to be tackled some time next month.
Before
After
The doorframe stripping is slated for completion by Tuesday so the painting will then happen over the rest of the week. While each coat of paint is drying I'll be turning my attention to another job that needs doing; the downstairs bathroom. The bathroom overhaul will not be happening until next year, but in the meantime it needs a new piece of lino, its rusty radiator wire brushing and painting, grout whitening, and new fixtures such as a toilet seat, towel rail etc. I'm hopeful I can get similar sized items so I can use the same holes in the tiles and do a direct replacement, rather than have to fill and drill all over again.
Martin has very wisely taken himself off to go under a car for the week to get it ready for an MOT on Tuesday, and he usually only emerges at the sound a teaspoon stirring his cup of tea or the rattle of the lid on the cake tin. He knows me too well to interfere and just let's me get on with it!
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