One of the projects I took on Natalie's house seemed fairly straight-forward: take up the indoor/outdoor carpet on the front steps and paint the concrete. The carpet came up with very little tugging. But I didn't get to paint until after several days of hard work. Actually the work was so hard, I wasn't able to work more than two or three hours a day. It was the carpet adhesive that gave me fits.
I researched removing the adhesive and found that Home Depot had a good product, recommended from removing carpet adhesive from concrete, Sentinel Formula 747 Adhesive Remover. Natalie and I went in to our local store to buy it and found the store didn't carry it. The salesman helping us suggested we use Goof -Off so Natalie bought a little spray can of it.
Then she took off on her trip to visit her mother in Pennsylvania. The weather was bad and I didn't get around to working on it until a couple of days before Christmas. The spray can lasted about an hour and removed about a square foot of adhesive - with substantial scrapping on my part.
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| So far the top right corner is done after the first hour of work |
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| Closeup of my work |
The next morning I started off going to stores further from Galveston looking, without any luck, for a better adhesive remover. I finally had to buy more of the goof-off, this time in a gallon container. Long story short, I ended up buying three gallons and using all but about a fourth of the last can on the project.
I couldn't get the adhesive completely removed before going off on my New's Year trip so it all had to wait until some good weather in January. January, is our month for winter, along with a couple of weeks in February, and that means that a few to several days a week, we get rain and enough cold to need a jacket. By this time Natalie was back and took her own pictures of me (below).
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| Several days and many hours later |
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| I'm down to the last step and rise |
By the time I got around to painting the steps, it was so cold, I needed a long underwear shirt under my sacrificial painting shirt, but the sun was shining. I managed to finish the adhesive removal and get two coats of paint on the stairs in the nice weather. But before the 24 hours were up, after the last coat of paint and we could have light traffic on the steps, it began raining again. However the paint held up and the house has a whole different look.
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| Almost finished with the first coat of paint |
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| All finished |
Next project: Paint the door - after some serious sanding, of course.
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