This Damn House

You know those tasks that terrify you?  The ones you've known were coming for months or years, and fill your days with dread and your nights with terror because you just know they are going to be hellishly hard?

Yeah.  My personal bugaboo was the beams holding the windows in the kids' bedroom.  They were stained and streaked and looked terrible.  but they are 15 feet high.    And over a newish carpet.  And before re-staining, they would need to have the existing stain somehow removed. 

So much was my dread of this project that 1) I procrastinated on it for years, and 2) I was so deeply in denial I failed to take any good "before" pictures.

But at last, the time arrived, and the time was this last weekend.  Saturday morning at the crack of dawn, we relocated the children and their furniture, laid down embarassing amounts of plastic on the floor, and began the long, tedious process of removing the stain.

The 72 hours following were too horrible to detail here until I process it in therapy and the Xanax kicks in to stop the panic attacks.  It was every bit as awful as I thought it would be and moreso.

So let me just present an "after" picture.

And here's a handy "how not to" tip for you:

No matter how much you object to using nasty stripper chemicals that release toxic VOCs into the environment, do not buy the eco-friendly non-toxic biodegradable citrus based stripping gel / floor wax / dessert topping.  Otherwise you will find, after spending 2 hours applying the gel, 4 hours letting it eat your wood, 4 hours trying to remove it with sponges, scrapers and steel wool, and 2 hours trying unsuccessfully to apply the stain over the remaining dessert topping residue, you will eventually declare defeat and buying different nasty VOC-releasing chemicals just to get the damn stuff off.   So, your choice: nasty toxic chemicals and a quick, easy job; or nasty toxic chemicals and a long, horrible, stinky job.