Paint Removal :: Using a Professional Re-Finisher

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. . . A bridge :: aka if there is such a thing as a personal hell – mine would be filled with poorly painted hinges: Part 3

So . . . you might have read my rant on hastily painted hardware. And maybe you have stayed with me long enough to know that I have a tendency (with this current house) to restore rather than replace.

While I intend to write about removing rust now, in many cases, I had to first remove paint before I could even get to the rust. (chuckle)

I have tackled this task, and I have made this claim elsewhere, of removing paint by almost every means conceivable. And . . . I do know some methods are cleaner and, in a pre-1970s house, more responsible than others.

For me, now, working on the front of the house, I want to talk about two places that rust has been a problem: 1) on the near original shutter hardware that I intend to re-install & 2) on the base/feet of the near original porch columns. (We have 5 porches.)

But now as I am working on the front of my house – my wife says to me – Do you think we can get the shutters back on so we can see what they look like? My answer usually, ah . . . maybe.

And really — we will see. Before winter hits, I do have several other things I want to accomplish on the outside of the house.

Not my house! Exterior restoration underway in DE (image by b)

One effective why to remove paint from your pieces is to take them to a professional. Early on, when we had that decent painter, he was nice enough to remove the shutters from the building before painting its body. Twenty-four windows on the house proper makes for 48 individual shutters, 96 hinges, which themselves when broken down gave us 192 hinge parts.

With both the shutters and the shutter hardware off the house, and I had already been doing some restoration on our other property – It was a no-brainer. I was going to take these parts to get dipped (see the Moxie Mouth at right for a definition of this).

I use the guys at Baltimore Finishing Works (Howard Street) for this type of stuff. They have been good to me, and they certainly seem to care about preserving pieces from our past.

I’ll admit — some of the hinges I delivered to them did not make it out the removal/paint stripping portion of the program. And I am certain that I do not have all of the shutter swing arms that I will need.

Next: I swear — removing rust and prepped rusted hardware for paint.