What, did you just paint?

So that's a comment we got on someone seeing our kitchen for the first time in a couple years.  It doesn't look like we did very much and was actually a pretty cheap project, but lets just say there are 400 man (and woman!) hours from March-August that have kept us really busy. 

It started with needing to rip up the old linoleum because we knew the original maple was under there.  Of course that was a disaster because it was linoleum, plywood, linoleum, fuzzy felt paper stuff bonded to maple.  This is one of the better views:

While the floor was being done, we figured we'd knock the tiles down off the wall and splurge on repairing the plaster.  Also see nasty linoleum that could only be cleaned with ammonia.

That was 2 months in and then the trouble started. The floors looked great.  The walls looked good.  But the painted woodwork lookes pretty bad.  Not only was it beige, it was cracked and peeling, slightly buried in plaster residue.  Being 5 months pregnant, I figured I'd only have the energy to sugar coat it with a coat of white paint until *someday* we could strip it.  But the plasterer suggested what we were afraid of, that getting a decent coat of paint on would be marginally less work now and certainly more work in the future than stripping it.

So we started on one window.  It took 40 hours.

We didn't know the best way to tackle this.  We had knowledge of all kinds of tools and methods at our disposal but at the end of the day were just trying to naturally figure out what worked.  We figured out an alternating approach with the Mr weilding a heat gun, then I would come back with a few coats of stripper, back to the Mr for sanding 60-80-120-220 grit, and I got the glorious (and I mean it) job of staining and laquering.

It's a really disheartening process.  It looks bad enough when you start stripping, and then it progressively looks much worse, until you finally start getting clean wood.  But wood, especially old growth original wood is extremely resillient and it's really amazing how you can go from before to after: