Strippers

Not really. More like Scrapers.

Katherine discovered some weeks ago that the living room in our apartment had some peel-y paint. It comes off in sheets. It's the kind of thing you start picking at when you're thinking about something else, and an hour later you're totally obsessed and there's a pile of paint peelings at your feet.

We thought, notwithstanding the weird fascination and satisfaction we derived from picking at the paint, it was probably going to end up being a somewhat daunting and large job to take care of the whole room. And the woodwork was going to be a real pain.

The diagnosis, of course, was latex paint over oil paint. Someone hadn't bothered to prime the oil layer properly before slapping a coat of latex over it.

The other day we were prepping to prime the back 4th floor bedroom, and I absently suggested we should probably make sure there wasn't oil paint up there too. A small scratch on the wall revealed...peeling paint.

You know on TV when someone does something they think isn't a big deal, and then there's a montage of a ginormous problem exponentially unfolding at a breakneck pace and suddenly their entire existence comes crashing down around their heads? We had a moment like that.

the. en. tire. house. is. covered. in. peeling. paint. every. square. inch.

Yah.

So we melted down a little bit. We get very quiet when we do that. Some people throw things at each other. We just get very quiet. That's because Katherine is a WASP from the midwest and I take after my mother.

I called my cousin Jeanette, who was a professional painter, and she very calmly told us what to do. We were to Bin it. Bin is an alcohol-based tinted shellac. It melts through the latex and bonds directly to the oil paint, creating a base for a new layer of latex. Or something like that. It's super-toxic and we need to wear those Darth Vader respirators or we'll pass out. So much for green renovation. But it works, it works well, it's expensive, but whatever. It works.

So we began to Bin. We are now master Binners. But if we can't compose coherent sentences or start drooling at dinner, you now know why.