Where's spring? and more scraping

Seriously, could the weather report get anymore wrong?  Predicted close to 60 and sunny when in actuality it was about 44 degrees, cloudy, and so windy that it felt like 20 degrees.  This meant we stayed inside and I scraped and R studded out the area where we removed a door.

I made good progress on paint removal around the newly uncovered niche.  By mid afternoon R started complaining about how cold it was in the house and that he hadn't heard the furnace kick on in quite awhile.  I immediately thought...'oh great, it's always something' when I looked in front of me and noticed that the thermostat indicated the room was 90 degrees.  Oops!!! I guess a LITTLE residual heat from the heat gun made it's way to the thermostat.

Why can't I rotate this photo???

The paint is coming off the foyer walls a lot easier than in the dining room.  Tomorrow I hope to finish the wall that I am currently scraping.  This would then leave me just narrow areas between the doors and dining room opening.

I tried to take a close up photo of the different colors of paint that I have uncovered but the photo doesn't capture the true colors (as I typed that, I could hear Cyndi Lauper singing).

The mocha brown was a very early layer, then a light tan, dark green, then the Mamie pink and finally white.

Of course I am still working on the little strip of paint by the crown in the dining room.  I am down to the area above two doors.  The paint is very hard to remove and because I am working over my head, I can only scrape for about 30 minutes. 

All this paint removal has me thinking about colors.  I thought I knew what I wanted but maybe not.

Uncovering new paint layers

The final dining room paint stripping areas are all the undesirable spots.  You know...above your head or at the floor and the narrow little areas between the three windows.  I also have a few tight spots left that require holding the heat gun with one hand while scraping in a very small area.  I have burnt my hand far too many times and I am now heat gun shy.

I scraped until my shoulder hurt so I walked around with my hot heat gun looking for fresh paint to scrap when I lost all self control and started scraping under the newly revealed niche in the foyer.  It seems that the niche stayed the same mustard gold for a long time but the rest of the foyer looks to have been painted a bazillion times.  Until I actually count all the layers...I'll stick with a bazillion.

Despite the additional layers the paint came off fairly easy.  I've uncovered a dark mocha brown, the sage green that shows up in the living room, and a new dark green layer. 

I hear that we have warmer weather heading our way.  Today was actually sunny and 52 but it felt much much colder.  The flower beds needs raking before the bulbs get too tall.  At this time last year the trees were budding and it had already reached 80 degrees.  Although that was nice it was bad for the trees but it's time to warm up and get on with spring.

A Niche is Nice

I've always loved niches. So imagine my surprise, when several years ago cracks appeared in our foyer, that formed a nice square.  We've eyeballed this area for two years trying to decide if there was indeed a niche in this area.  So today I decided to peel away the edge and found this.

First, we decided to drill a hole in hopes of possibly seeing into the cavity.  We actually did not even try to look into the hole because when R pulled the drill bit out of the hole some paper backing came out with it.  Ah ha! drywall. This gave us the needed information necessary to go ahead and demo the square. 

Thirty minutes later we had the drywall gone.

Start to finish....one hour.

Now as to why it was covered over.  Who knows.  But based on the color I would say it was sometime before the 1950's which was the peak of the Mamie Pink era.   Our house spent a long time painted the original gold mustard color.  Some areas of the house also have a sage green layer after the mustard but not the foyer or dining room.

Here is the run down on the dining room/foyer colors from first to last.

Mustard gold (niche color)
Grey beige
Mamie pink
Flat white which was sprayed by person from whom we purchased the house.

Since the niche is mustard gold color, it looks like this was an early modification.  Regardless of when it was modified, it's HIS TO RY now.