A tale full of sanding fury
Sanding the yellow paint off our stairs is proving more difficult than we expected. The central section of paint on each step comes off easily enough with an electric sander and 40 grit sandpaper (sorry, I’m not sure if a grit is a proper SI unit or not). The four or five inches at each side of every step, however, is painted a sort of drab greenish-blue. We think it might have been there ever since the house was built, fifty years ago. Even 40 grit paper won’t shift it, so we’ve been trying other methods.
Firstly, we got out our trusty heat gun. We had some gloss paint to remove, so after we’d peeled that off, we tried the gun on one of the stairs. The yucky greeny blue paint still wouldn’t budge. Maybe I could have left the heat gun trained on the stubborn patch for a bit longer, but I had a hunch that it would make no difference. Call me cautious if you like, but I didn’t want to overdo things; after all, there’s no point in accidentally setting fire to the stairs just because you’re being over-enthusiastic about shifting a bit of paint.
Secondly, we got a couple of wire-brush attachments for our drill. For one moment, we thought we’d cracked the problem. But then we noticed the wire brush was scouring the wood more roughly than we wanted. Wire brushes are, in any case, really meant to be used on metal rather than wood, so perhaps we shouldn’t have been too surprised at their being unsuitable for our delicate little stairs.
We eventually discovered that the only way to get rid of the blue paint was to sand it off manually. Crazy, isn’t it? Why should relatively slow (i.e., manual) sanding be more effective than machine sanding? If you’re an engineer or a physicist, why not leave a comment and tell us the answer. While you’re at it, how about volunteering some of your valuable engineering or physicisting time and coming round to give us a hand with a bit of sanding?
Tomorrow (fingers crossed) should see the arrival of one of Shana’s mail order bargains — a big roll of extra coarse sandpaper. And when I say ‘big’, I mean about 30 feet long. That’s some roll! I’d love to see the Andrex puppy try to run off with that. Ha, it’d probably be a bit too…rough!
Update [12th November]: I was so obsessed with grumbling about the deficiencies of machine sanding, that I clean forgot to mention the afternoon we spent earlier this week lathering non-caustic chemical paint stripper on one of our doors. We used a whole litre of the stuff and, yes, I admit it did get rid of the gloss topcoat. The ubiquitous blue yuck underneath proved a more worthy opponent. The door now seems to have an extreme case of wood psoriasis, although Shana claims the peeling, distressed look is merely ’shabby chic’. Any more remarks like that and I swear I’ll cancel her subscription to Idle Homes magazine.
Second update in a week: We have finally given in to laziness (and the sneaking suspicion that some of the immoveable paint might just contain lead) and decided to repaint the stairs instead of continuing with our sandpapering efforts. We already wanted a change of look to the stairs and hallway; we’re simply going for a slightly different change to the one we’d originally planned.

As joint project manager of Decorating Ops at our new HQ, I am pleased to report that we are now tackling the hall (or what we prefer to call the ‘vestibule’) and stairs.
And so I came up with a third solution: a ‘home-brewed’ extendable wallpaper scraper.