Scrape and Pillage

Someone nominate me for the 'Most-scraping-with-a-snap-off-blade' of the year awards.

Whilst Ellen has been busy painting, I've been doing the opposite. And I don't mean rolling paint off the walls into paint tins.  SCRAPING~@!

It first started with the 'boiler room' (can't think of what else to call it as it only has the boiler in, so the title seems fitting for now) walls as the paint was flaking. 

I also started this before when we first had the new boiler installed, you can probably tell from the patchy bits of white plaster.

So one Saturday night I put on the mp3 player and went to town on this for hours on end. There's some simple pleasures in life and I must say, scraping off GINORMOUS patches of paint in one go must be up the top of the list.  The little bits, well they're not worth the time or effort.

Nevertheless, I've been in that cupboard on several occasions now using my trusty blades and taking off the paint.  As a bonus I managed to take off some of the plaster as well. This is a photo prior to the 'oops I've made a hole in the plasterwork' moment.  I suppose it's another job for me to do at a later date, and I'm sure it'll be blogged about. Something along the lines of -  'Hey, look at me. I've filled in the mess I made!'

Here's the finished article. Doesn't really look that different from the first photo.  But as you can see there is a hole in the plasterwork on the left which looks like a key?? and the rest of the top needs to be scraped off.  This is all small little chippy pieces of paint and so I'll have to get fired up on Lucozade to actually have the energy to finish it off.


It's not only walls that I've been scraping.  There have been several doors in the mix too. I've pretty much scraped all the doors we've got back to wood as the previous owners' paintwork was sloppy and you could see the paint drips.  Well the other day (or maybe week) we received free doors from our neighbour that match all our other doors except the ones in the living room. Being the man I am,  I'm stripping them down for Ellen to repaint.  Off comes the white paint, on goes some white paint!

This is actually the 2nd door to be stripped, I've already done the first but only thought of taking a before and after photo when I was nearly finished.  So I started fresh on this one.  Not liking the white paint (and the strange smell it gives off) I stripped it down to it's true form...

And geeeeeeees Louise, it stinks worse than it did when it was painted.  You can certainly taste it that's for sure.  It was like having a 3 course meal.  Starter - Varnish nibbles.  Main - Varnish à la mode. Dessert - Double Varnish sundae.

I must have gorged on those nibbles as my fingers reeked.  No matter how many times I washed my hands, there was still a little trace of varnish lingering.

And this is the aftermath of one door scraping.  The paint tray is pretty deep so that's a lot of paint (this includes the other side of the door too) and most of it is on the floor.  I must say, I do like to discover what's underneath the plain white.  In this case it was 'awesome green'. I'm sure that's what it must have said on the paint tin in the shop when it was bought.. In the 1940's!  Ha Ha!

The underbelly of the other door was a 'nice' red colour, probably from the same paint range.  Camo green and blood red, what must their living room have looked like..??



If only it was yellow instead of green I could have look like a giant Rhubarb and Custard sweet.

And then here I would be, blogging about licking the paint off the walls instead of scraping them.