Stripping!

I tried my hand at paint stripper.  We're trying to take the 37 coats of paint off the bathroom door prior to adding a nice clean coat of Swiss Coffee (our trim white).  It's not going too well...  

What a mess

After 2 passes with the paint stripper

I'm not even close to the original wood.  Part of me wonders how much better the stuff would work in the 65-85 degrees recommended range, rather than the 35 degrees in our garage that I was working in, part of me wonders if really old paint is just that resistant to removal?!  The sticky, goopy Behr paint came off resonably quickly, but it was taking a LOT of the paint stripper to get very far.  Brian says if it doesn't work, we'll just buy a new door, but I'm all about making it work!  Right now, it looks like the kind of thing you might find on display in an antique or craft shop with some berry wreath hanging over it!  Maybe we should embrace the antique look?!

On a different note, we've shown our house to a couple of realtors and an interested party.  Everyone agrees that our living room doesn't feel very large.  Could it be that we have "suburban gigantic" furniture in there, since it was purchase to fit in our previous house (and never made it to the top of the to-do list).  So we're working on a solution to try to open the place up.  We've pulled 2 of the 3 tables and have our throw blanket in there pretending to be a rug right now.  It definitely feels more open.  Seems like this week we're going shopping for an area rug and a tiny accent table.  Haven't decided yet how much of the old stuff is going on Craigslist, but most likely the end tables, possibly the whole room.  Know anyone who might be interested?

Here's the rug of interest so far... Target rug