Last night I had an idea: Wouldn't it be nice to strip the layers of paint off the transom window hardware so that it shows up against the trim? I've seen reproduction transom hardware in brass and thought I just might have something like that under the paint. I decided early on, though, that if the paint didn't come off easily or if the metal underneath didn't look pretty that I was going to abandon this little project. After more than a year of feeling chained to the house while I was tearing off shingles and painting the exterior, I have limited patience and a short attention span. The paint did not come off easily. What metal showed through here and there looked like steel or iron, so it's not pretty anyway. Abandon project! Abandon project!
But wait...check out that little knob that tightens against the operator rod to hold the window open...under that blobby paint there might be something...
So I took the knob off the operator rod and soaked it in Goo Gone for half an hour. Goo Gone is yucky stuff. It smells like a mixture of gasoline, ethyl alcohol, and nail polish remover. If you get it in a small cut on your finger you will almost pee your pants from the pain before you can run to the sink and wash it off. I'm just sayin'. Thirty minutes later, with rubber gloves and a mask on, I fished the knob out of the Goo Gone and scrubbed on it with a toothbrush. (The only toothbrush I have, so remind me to go buy another one. Soon.) Almost no paint came off. This is the first time ever that Goo Gone has failed me. So I scrubbed some more, and put the knob back in the stuff, and left it there for another 30 minutes. I repeated this process six more times. Somewhere in there I went to my Mom's house and borrowed her nutmeat picker thingy so I could scritch and scratch paint out of the little nooks and crannies of the knob. (And please don't tell her I used it for that, okay?) Three hours or so later, the blobby little knob looked like this:
Is that not the most beautiful little operator rod knob you've ever seen?! (Okay, so maybe it's the only little operator rod knob you've ever seen...) Solid brass. Gorgeous. Kudos to Mrs. Kelly for picking it out. She could have chosen something that looks kind of like a modern-day binder clip, which was much more common then, but she chose something beautiful instead. Bless her heart. Now, standby for rant in three...two...one...RANT. Who in their right freaking mind paints over something like this?! Someone looked at this beautiful workmanship and thought, "I believe I'll paint over it with lead paint that's nearly impossible to remove." Then some other idiot came along after them and said, "I think I'll further obliterate the detail on that little knob by doing a really crappy job of painting." And after that, some color-blind fool painted it turquoise, so you almost can't blame whoever put the final coat of paint on it. Seriously?!?! Who does something like that?! Oh yeah, sucky previous owners, that's who. (And the worst part is, the first coat of paint at least was probably put on there by Mrs. Kelly's son Aub, who turned the house into two apartments and owned it until 1951.) As my friend Michelle says, "Jeez Louise!"
But it's all better now. There are six more knobs just like this on the other transom windows, and I'll strip the paint off them, too, as I go along.
Oh, and I have one more photo. This one's for Karen Anne:
Thirteen double rolls of paper. It's mocking me. I distinctly heard it say, "The dining room's already kicking your hiney and you haven't even started papering!" Then it laughed. Or maybe I just hallucinated that after inhaling Goo Gone fumes for three hours.