By Rosemary Thornton
"Nice fireplace," my friend said in passing as she walked into my living room and sat on the couch.
"Nice fireplace?" I repeated, as though her genuine compliment was nearly an insult.
"Let me tell you about that fireplace," I said as I strolled over to the oak mantel and stroked the old wood with a soft touch that represented two parts reverence and one part exasperation.
Some folks who visit our home just don't understand the full import of before and after - especially when it comes to things like stripping wood and removing a good dozen layers of paint from a 100 year old fireplace.
I figure it is my duty, my calling, to educate those folks.
"You know," I tell them with a serious tone to my voice, "when we bought this house, the fireplace was covered in beige latex paint. Beige!"
And from there, I tell them as succinctly as possible, about the dozens of hours I spent stripping layer after layer of paint off the old oak mantel.
When I've finished my condensed version of this little tale, some people have that "deer in the headlights look." Others simply nod their head and ask me how my girls are doing in school. But there are those who launch into their own war stories, and tell me about the time they found walnut hardwoods buried under lime green painted moldings.
No doubt about it: Stripping paint separates the men from the boys, as it were. Or the old house lovers from the weekend remodelers.
In the beginning . . .
Two years ago, when my husband and I first walked into the living room of this 100 year old home, my eyes were drawn to the lovely coal-burning fireplace in the corner of the room. Sitting at an angle between the pocket doors and the living room window, the fireplace beckoned me to come closer and ponder what kind of gorgeous wood lay hidden underneath the layers and layers of detail-numbing paint.
As my eyes and thoughts pulled away from fireplace and scanned the room, I noted one significant problem with the mantel and the living room and the entire house.
Everything in the house was painted, papered, paneled or plopped in either beige or blue.
Glancing around the room, I could not find a spot where beige and blue were not.
After talking with the real estate agent and haggling with the seller, we settled on $50,000 for the TLC-needing, 1,800-square-foot home.
The packing boxes which held all our earthly possessions were still in our midst when I silently migrated over to the mantel and started to do a "quickie" scraping on the Corinthian columns.
My husband of 20 years panicked when he heard the "scrunch, scrunch, scrunch" sound of a putty knife working the paint off old wood trim.
"Rose," he said with a voice still weary from our marathon unpacking session, "let's wait and get into that once we're all settled in."
"Okay" I replied as I redirected my energies back to unpacking.
But I still wondered what lay hidden under those layers of beige paint.
Hidden secrets
A few days later, I decided to test a "sample" spot on the back of one of those columns. But just scraping at the paint with a putty knife was neither productive nor satisfying. Getting out the heat gun, I noticed for the first time that there was an outlet right beside the mantel, near the baseboard.
"It's a sign," I thought, as I plugged in and fired up my old heat gun.
Some 10 to 12 layers of paint willingly surrendered their spot on the mantel piece, curling up and dying in quick order and falling in smoking heaps to the ground. As I suspected, the mantel had originally been varnished. Fortunately, the brute who first painted over this natural woodwork had not bothered to sand off the old varnish. The layers of paint peeled away easily, exposing a solid oak mantel with beautiful veins and a deep dark patina.
In a very short time, my one hidden spot was no longer hidden. I looked up at the clock and realized I had been at work for almost two hours and had stripped about one third of the mantel.
When my spouse came home and saw the disfigured mantel - now looking like a salvaged remnant from a house that had been on fire, he drew a deep, patience-inspiring breath and said "I guess we're working on the mantel now."
Burning paint off the first third of that fireplace mantel was highly entertaining and rewarding. The next third was not so invigorating. The last third, which consisted of digging out great quantities of latex, oil and leaded paint from intricate spaces and places was brutal.
I managed to scorch the top of one of the columns, by getting the beige paint too hot, which in turned burned the intricate woodwork underneath.
I had hoped that if I got the paint hot enough, it would bubble out of the dark and hidden places.
It didn't happen that way.
Finally, after investing about 18 hours in the project, the paint was completely burned off the entire mantel and there were only two or three scorch marks.
The pry bar
The next step was to pull the mantel off the wall so we could take it outside and apply the paint remover.
My husband paused as we stood in the corner of the living room and I handed him the pry bars and tools of destruction.
"Once we pull this off," he said, looking deep into my eyes, "I want you to stick with it and finish it and don't begin another wood working project until this one is done."
"Sure, sure, sure," I quickly agreed, hoping he wasn't serious.
The mantel was held in place by fewer than a dozen strategically placed nails. It came off the wall easily.
Behind the mantel we discovered a small oval photo of a woman wearing a long skirt and a high collared blouse, very turn-of-the-century looking. Water stains and dirt and coal dust had damaged the tiny photo, but the image was unmistakable. The photo was very old and had been there for a long time.
Who was she? We wondered about this as we passed the photo around to each other.
Setting the photo aside, we carried the heavy oak mantel down to our work area in the basement.
And there it sat for a long time.
See Rose's Tips on Stripping and Restoring Mantels and Mouldings
Rose Thornton writes for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and is the author of two books. She lives in an old house -- and loves writing about them, too. Look for more of her work here in the months ahead.
