Excelsior!

[truepenny]

The Mirador, Chapter 15: 10,384 words

Three cheers for momentum, and for being able to just CUT things that aren't helping.

mirrorthaw and I also made some progress on the stairs. Tomorrow I'm going to try heresluck's baking-soda-and-hot-water idea.

Comments

[larryhammer]

Yay progress!

Finished The Virtu and very much liked seeing the second half of the story wrap up so well. And with everyone that much more damaged. (Though I confess an idiosincratic reaction to one detail: I've stolen just about every other name from Alkman for characters, so kept expecting Haigisikhora to be a person not place.)

---L.

[hackerguitar.livejournal.com]

Awaiting the delivery of The Virtu. Can't arrive quite soon enough.

If you're trying to get paint off stairs, the following may help - this from a house-repair wonk.

1. Try 3M Safest Stripper. It's citrus-based and doesn't contain methylene chloride, and so is safer.
2. determine the wood of the stairs. Closed pore woods like pine, maple, cherry, hickory, et cetera, will scrape cleanly very nicely. Open-pore woods like mahogany, oak, ash, et cetera, won't.
3. If the stairs are open-pore wood, scrape them more-or-less clean with stripper, then remove the rest them with a scraper plane (http://www.woodworking.org/WC/Channels/scraper.html) and then wire-brush or steel-wool or abrasive-pad them along the grain to pull out the remainder of the paint.
4. Once the surface is back to bare wood, put at least a couple of coats of shellac (http://www.zinsser.com/product_detail.asp?ProductID=72) on the stairs before putting anything else on. Shellac is a sort of universally useful agent and strips relatively easily and also neatly fills the pores with a clear finish that will bond to almost any finish atop it. And it looks great.

And at the local library, find Michael Dresdner's The Woodfinishing Book. The chapter on refinishing should be given to anyone contemplating refinish work...