Kitchen / Stairs Week 3, Days 1 -3

My informal plan for the weekend was

• Remove lino remnants from the kitchen floor and back stairs
• Strip all baseboards remaining in place
• Strip the red paint off of the floor on the north end of the kitchen
• Finish removing the wallpaper on the stairs

It's 9:15 on a Sunday night and none of the tasks are completely complete. I got off all of the lino remnants in the kitchen itself but got caught up on the stairs.


The back stairs are an interesting animal, in order to remove the vinyl from them you must first remove the metal stair tip... sounds easy enough right? Nope. The nails for the stair tread are almost impossible to pull out, they sit nearly flush and like to spin in place as you try to remove them. Then there is the removal of the sheet of plywood that they stapled onto the original stair tread with hundreds of little itsy-bitsy staples. I begin prying up the plywood and it's going pretty well at first but it gets caught up. Apparently you need to cut the linoleum at the back of the tread and take out the little piece of pine that they sandwiched into the stairs to make the vinyl fit better. So I get the pine out and am ready to pull the tread off but instead it got stuck on the ledge on the right hand side of the stars and I had to have Chris break the board in half for me in order to get it out . After that I was pretty much done for the day.

Today I got stripper onto the fire engine red paint on the floor on the north wall. I'm hoping that if I let the paint stripper sit for the full 24 hours it will take the paint right off and I won't have to screw around with it too much. A girl can dream right?

Now one might ask why bother using paint stripper at all when you're planning on sanding the floor anyways. I'd say that there is a better than average chance that there is lead in this red paint. Lead and asbestos seem to be in everything in an old house in some way shape or form. We just try to be as careful as possible without going too overboard.