Like many of our fellow housebloggers, we had a productive weekend. The garage sale was a bust despite my 6 brightly-colored signs and newspaper ad, but we donated most of the leftovers so they will live on in someone else’s house. Ours is one ounce less messy, and that’s enough to make me happy. And in case you’re wondering, someone took the green velvet couch off our hands.

Teague finished shingling the roof on the kitchen addition, and started putting clapboard up on the other side of the house. The roof was a messy job. Everywhere you look (our laundry basket, our car seats, his work boots, the windowsill….) he has left little tar smears, lest I forget how hard he was working in the noon-day sun while kneeling on thick black shingles. FYI, Goo Gone works great on tar when it’s on a hard surface. Not sure I’d try it on fabrics though.

My weekend duties included overseeing the garage sale, stripping one of our front doors, and painting the living room a darker teal color. It looks MUCH better – pictures to follow very soon. We had a few visitors and all agreed it was nice, I hope they weren’t just being kind!

The front door turned out to be a hassle, of course. What project doesn’t? One half was painted white with shellac underneath, and the heat gun worked great on this side. The other side has an opaque brown shellac with no paint over it, and is proving much harder to clean. It looks as though some type of red paint is actually the first layer – then a brown shellac. In any case, the heat gun just made a sticky, hard mess of this stuff so I’ve been using chemical stripper which is not nearly as enjoyable or fast, especially with some deep molding that is fighting me at every turn.

Here’s the shellac-only side of the door, in progress:

Here’s a closer look at the shellac mess after two rounds of chemical stripping and scraping:

It’s mostly clean now, but is going to needs lots of scrubbing with denatured alcohol to remove all of the shellac. For those curious about a good paint-stripping process, check out House In Progress’s latest entry on the subject. They know their stuff!