It's been a few weeks now since we picked up the keys and we've been making decisions, then changing our minds, then thinking of new ideas, then changing our minds again.Where do you draw the line and say to yourself "I love this idea!" and then stick to it? We have both made ourselves giddy with the enormity of this job and have had to basically calm ourselves down by getting stuck into a job we initially thought wouldn't happen, but then... we changed our minds.The skirting boards.
They were smothered in 20 layers of paint, think and bubbly, chipped and well, to put it bluntly, bloody ugly. Originally we proposed to rip them all off and render over any chips in the wall left behind. That left us in a bit of a bind, because if we go down that path then you have to streamline it by taking off the architraves around the door frames... which is a lot of work, with all the paint stripping, rendering, sanding, etc. So we changed our minds.
The stripping part wasn't as bad as i'd expected. We bought 2L of stripper, Methylated Spirits, rubber gloves, 2 scrapers and 2 brushes from Bunnings, and we were on our way. With our face masks securely tightened we painted on the first layer of stripper. It was thick and gluggy but fairly easy to use. I discovered it burns like acid on your skin so protection is a must! 3 layers later, we had the paint stripping of easy as pie.
The skirting needs a good sand after the final layer of paint is scraped off, and we also had big gaps between the boards and the wall, so we filled the gap with some heavy duty silicone, and sanded again.We are going to keep them white, and above is what they will look like in the bedroom after we paint it Heavey Metal 247.
What do you think? Was it worth it? Total hours not including painting is approx. 10. I'm so glad we decided to keep them because on the weekend there was an "Open for Inspection" in one of the units in our building, so of course, we had a little sticky-beak and they had the original skirting boards, minus all the paint mind you, and they looked fabulous - and so will ours!
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