23 Sticks

While our newly transplanted Russian Sage endures a slow death in the back yard, I decided to move on to a new project. A while ago I mentioned painting all of our wood trim and doors, but that was before our gas line started leaking, in turn thrusting our back yard to the front of the priorities line. So with the back yard at a manageable stage and a newly purchased paint gun it seems like now is the time to start. The first thing to be removed was the little hand rail that's mounted to the wall. I brought all of our little clickety wrench sockets upstairs because I didn't know what size to use. After about a minute I had a match and in the time it took to remove 5 bolts I had this big chunk of wood off the walls.

Now its time to remove the little vertical stick things (technical term). They are held on by 2 bolts at the bottom that go into the wall, and 2 at the top that connect to the rail. I decided to remove every other one, that way if one of us gets a little too drunk we won't fall to our deaths when we stumble up to bed.






Since the stick things were so easy to remove I decided to move on to the big railing along the catwalk upstairs.




That was a lot of clickety wrench action!




After removing all those stick things I sanded them down. I started with 60 grit sand paper on my little vibrating sander, then smoothed them down even more with some 150 grit paper. There were a few spots where the varnish had dripped, those spots took a little more sanding. But all in all it went pretty quickly. Well as quickly as sanding a bunch of boards can go.




Oh, and after all that my forearms were so sore that night. Like to the point of not wanting to move my arms. Maybe those orbital sanders would be a little better. If you've got any advice for avoiding painful arms after sanding I'm all ears!

Hopefully we'll get some paint thinner and solvent so we can use our new paint gun and give these a pretty new finish. Fingers crossed!

- Nikki