The Great Esc(r)ape 2013: Day 5

Total burns: 3

Total blisters: 2

We've put in a solid few hours each day after work scraping the front porch area with the help of our new friend, the Speedheater. I am still very much enamored of our Speedheater but its novelty as a cool new toy has worn off. It's just a lot of flippin' work. I keep reminding myself and Tim that it will all be worth it in the end: we will have a beautiful house with paint that will last many years. Yes, that's what I keep telling myself. We'll see how long this strategy works.

You can see some of the fruit of our labor below. We've definitely learned a few things so far.

1) Having one person hold the Speedheater and the other person scrape goes a heckuva lot faster.

2) You need something into which to put all the scraped paint. There's a ton of paint on this old house (we're loving referring to it right now as This Old Crack House) and it gets heavy fast.

3) Gloves are needed. You can easily burn yourself on the metal parts of the heater. I learned this the hard way (sad face).

4) The power switch is in an inconvenient place on the handle and easily turned off.

5) Make sure you have a heavy-duty extension cord. It draws a lot of power and gets hot quickly.

Other than that, it's pretty great. 

The other part of my motivation strategy is to do the front porch area first simply to be able to have something finite and complete to see relatively soon. I really would like to be able to paint by Sunday (today is Thursday), at least the clapboards. The railings are going to take a lot more time than I had hoped and we're going to need some other tools to help us with the scraping of the more intricately carved woodwork. We'll definitely update when we start.