Month: October 2016

Okay so I had a customer call with a bird problem.  Above her porch, they had built the upper porch of the building in such a way that they had created perfect nesting areas for birds.  Here you are looking up at a ceiling of rafters, and to the right you can see these perfectly designed bird house ledges at the top of the white wall.   They were all filled with bird nest material.  

SO . . . I went to the hardware store and searched for some kind of chicken coop anti-bird material, and I came up with “hardware cloth.”

Also see my new toy, a pair on tin snips for cutting it.  So with much measuring and plotting I cut pieces of the wire mesh and placed these fitted pieces in the enclosures . . .

It’s not done yet– I still have to go back and smooth it all out and put in more brads,

But at last the customer is bird free.  She is so happy.

Something I truly hate to see is nice old varnished woodwork where previous occupants have done a sloppy paint job and gotten splotches of paint all over it:

As you can see, it was both red and light green paint.  God knows how long it was on there.

Such sloppiness is an insult to the spirit, feels like slum living really, so when this client asked me to paint this bedroom, I had to start by reviving the beauty of the woodwork.

I had to go at it, as my grandmother used to say, “like killing snakes.”  There was no advice on youtube on how to do it, so I just went at it with every tool I had.

So the first step was to take my Swiss army knife and just try to shave off the biggest chunks and just generally “break the seal” of the paint.  Then I actually used a dental cleaning tool to scrape the next layer off– I had to always be careful to not go too deep and ruin the finish or the wood.  Then I took a toothbrush and some alcohol and baking soda and again, it was like a dental cleaning, scrubbing it off.  Amazingly, the alcohol did not take off the original finish, but it softened the unwanted paint enough that it would scrub off.

It took a lot of hard high pressure scrubbing and it killed my hands, but I finally got 2 door jambs and two windows back to nearly original look.

Still looks a little sloppy in this pic as I have not painted the wall yet, and I need to take a stain pen and fix a multitude of sins.  But oh my what a difference.