While I’ve been slaving working away on the bathroom, Casey has started up a couple projects of her own.

The first project is one that she has been wanting to tackle since we first lived in this house while attending college years ago: the upstairs newel post and railing. As with the rest of the trim in the house, it had at least half a dozen layers of paint on it. Thankfully, there was a very shiny layer of shellac or varnish of some sort that allowed the heat gun to make quick work of it.

Her other project has been stripping paint off of door hardware. It wasn’t until I started reading house blogs a few months ago that I knew the easy way to strip metal hardware. Before I knew the easy way, I was taking a heat gun to them and doing the best I could with that. In case you don’t know what the easy way is, you just simply remove the hardware from the door, and place it into a pot of hot/boiling water with some dishwasher soap in it (or even dish soap works). Let it sit for 30 minutes or so, and the paint will practically fall right off. Once you have the majority of the paint off, use some denatured alcohol in a cheap spray bottle with some steel wool to clean it up. If you don’t want new looking hardware, don’t spend too much time with the steel wool otherwise it will clean it up a bit too much.

And lastly, the other “project” Casey has been working on is getting the house turned a bit more into a home, given the state of construction it is in constantly. For the first few weeks, we mostly stayed in the very small upstairs, as the main floor was dusty, dirty, and simply, a mess. After going after the floor several times with a mop, she was able to get furniture positioned in a more comfortable way. She also brought some of our son’s toys down to make it easier to keep him entertained. Due to the fragile paint, nothing is on the walls yet though.

For now, I’ll start out revealing the upstairs that I was supposed to do a while back

First off, our temporary “master” bedroom:

Our son’s bedroom before his bed was placed where I am standing:

And a picture of half of the insanely tiny upstairs kitchen (with half fridge) and my son helping (un)load the refridgerator: