The weekend weather was rubbish. Rain and heat, no sun but really bloody humid, the worst kind of heat. Perfect weather to don a mask and use a heat gun.
The concrete slab in the study is busy drying, no-one is allowed on it until Monday. We were half expecting to find a cat in it this morning. There is no glass in the windows and there is a cat that breaks into the house at night, we find its footprints in the dust. Thankfully this did not happen!
Cat is stripping the paint from the sitting room window. You can see she is delighted to be doing this in the rain.
The colour that we want to paint the windows outside. It is a Farrow & Ball paint called ‘Down Pipe’.
It is grey but looks very blue in daylight. The blue perfectly complements the orange stone. This is a winner.
Decades and decades of paint being removed, it was about 2mm thick! We can now see the lovely shaped profile of the oak frame.
The shutters appear to be soft wood, probably old pine, but we don’t think they are oak or elm (they would be really heavy if they were).
Jasper still doesn’t like going inside the house, but is happy to sit in the garden in the mud. Sort of.
It’s too hot for masks. An absolute necessity though as the paint we are removing undoubtedly is lead based.
Once we have removed as much of the paint as we can with the heat gun, it is then sanded with the palm sander. This is small and delicate enough for the task, anything larger would be too abrasive.
It’s painstaking work, slow and very time consuming, but will be worth it.
The timber is beautiful and slightly wobbly. You can see it was handmade.
The exterior frame is quite badly weathered and worn. The bottom of the frame that is rotten will be repaired by Glynn with new oak, then it will be sanded and tidied up before being painted.
The interior of the frame is in much better condition than the exterior, and is cleaning up beautifully. We are now thinking about leaving the frame as bare wood on the inside.
A lovely detail of the end of one of the iron bars across the window opening.
Not going for the bright blue on the windows and front door then? 😆
Did you spot that then? The windows and doors were painted a bright turquoise blue at some point, probably in the seventies…!