Exterior Painting Preparation: Scrape, Sand, and Scrape and Sand

Just so you know, it's not all fun and games at the Crawfish homestead.  (As if some of those neck resets are fun). 

Now that it's springtime, there are a number of outside activities I must partake in.  Such as repainting the outside of the sunroom.

You may recall the sunroom project from way back when.  I can't believe it's been three years since it was done.  Anyway, there was a contractor who painted the outside about 5 years ago, and he did a bad job.  Long story short, little or no prep.  If you have ever done any house painting, you know that the prep is crucial.  If you don't do the prep right, well, you'll be doing the job all over again in a few years.

I decided to break the job down and do each side (3 walls) of the sunroom individually.  Good move, as it turns out.  It's pretty tedious.

Here's a shot of the trim after I scraped it.  It looks ugly, but I'm confident we'll have it looking good soon.  The bare spots where I scraped the old (peeling after 5 years!) paint off look bad.  But the part that makes me crazy is the old paint on the brick.  Someone - I suspect the Previous Owner - was fond of slapping on mass quantities of caulk and then painting it and all the brick close to it.

Either wisely or foolishly (jury's out on that), I've decided to pull off all the old caulk and get the paint off the brick.  Here you can see the seam where I removed caulk, but there's plenty more on the brick, along with paint.

At first I used some spray on "commercial" Goof-off.  It worked pretty well in loosening up the old caulk.  I used a utility knife to scrape it off.  Tedious, but it worked.

I'm still working on the paint as I write this.  I'm using Citri-Strip paint stripper, and 90 percent of the paint is gone.  It looks far better than this picture.

While I was doing applications of stripper, I went to work on the wood that's going to be repainted. 

I used a three-prong approach:  first, a spin with a wire brush to get the loose peeling paint off. 

This worked ok, but not as well as I expected.

Then a pass with my trusty Ryobi orbital sander.  Best 40 bucks I ever spent (they now go for 60).  It may not be the best one out there but it does the job.  It's a bit underpowered, I've come to find out. 

I used 40 grit paper for this first pass.  It's actually starting to look better.  I'll do a pass of 60, then 100 or 120 and see where it's at before I prime it.  There are a lot of divots I'll need to fill.  Joy joy joy.

I also did a pass with 36 grit on a (I know, 36 grit, right?) sanding pad.  This helped get some of the spots I couldn't hit with the machine.

More to come. 

Also:  more guitars to come too!