Fireplace Tales

I’ve been feeling like a bit of a fraud recently. 

My post on the miraculous Soy Gel paint stripper had been picked up by various people, most notably Apartment Therapy and Not Martha, while all the while my fireplace was still looking like this.

So much for walking the talk.  Please note that this is not because of any problems with said miraculous paint stripper but because of sheer laziness on behalf of the fireplace’s new owners.

So, shamed into action, said owners spent last weekend slathering the fireplace with what remained of the miraculous paint stripper.

We again left it overnight, to be greeted by this the following morning.    I have to say that this time, because we used a lot more gloop, the smell was rather unpleasant, but not unbearable and certainly not like it might be causing you a nasty chemical-induced death.

Here’s close up of how the paint bubbles up and falls off of its own accord.

After a lot of peeling and a bit of scraping, this is what we ended up with.

As you can see, a 1 quart bottle got rid of most of the red, most of the white layer underneath and quite a lot of the greyish (primer?) under that. We’ve deliberately kept the upside-down brick pyramid thingies underneath mantel red, as we were thinking of painting them white, and likewise keeping the bricks at the bottom white (thought the Husband did mistakenly put paint stripper on the righthand upside-down brick pyramid thingy, so the paint has bubbled and needs to be sanded).

A new bottle of SoyGel has just arrived from Amazon, so this weekend it’s onwards and upwards.  Tune in for another gripping instalment (hopefully) next week.

Online ordering is now back on the site!  It just remains to be seen whether Lynx Internet has indeed lost the entire customer database (thank goodness most of it was uploaded into our separate email database) and the historic order database. It also remains to be seen whether I can sue them for all the additional grey hairs they helped create at the weekend.