This was a downtown Toronto house renovation that ended up having extra painting work added in during the final stages. As the project was wrapping up and everything was starting to take shape, it felt like the finished product would lack those nice final touches if we didn’t go the extra mile. One of things that fit into the extras was the house’s exterior front door awning.
They had an attachment to the outside awning of this house and we were to restore the wood to its natural state before staining it. There was a significant amount of paint on it, probably ten years worth of paint. With layers of paint like that you have to be patient. The approach I choose was a two prong paint removal attack. I was going to use paint stripper and also have a heat gun by my side. With a job like this you want to be able to be flexible. Some paint will respond to one method of removal better then the other, I find the initial layer tends to bubble up and come off quicker then the less weathered or penetrated deeper layers of paint. For those layers I used the heat gun along side the remover in succession. I needed my reserve of elbow grease to finish this one off, the paint doesn’t come off by itself .. unless they had a pretty bad painter paint it before. Say that ten times fast!
