Gluttons for Punishment

an old house has so many charming things in it that can be salvaged.  a door.  a window or its frame.  fireplace mantels.  We've actually been able to salvage all of the above and its works pretty well with all the "new" around it

the last item up on the salvage list was a old radiator.

originally, the plan was to salvage 3 of the 6 old radiators in the house.  now, the dont work anymore [they cracked on the inside] but they look really cool and I wanted to keep that flavor around

*notice I didnt say "we" on this one...because this was definitely an "I" thing ;-)

as time went by and we saw how hard it was to strip those old doors, the goal went down to two radiators....then just one.   [someone was getting their way....hmmmmm]

so we/I went ahead with stripping the thick layers of lead paint off of the old radiator.

we found that it was about 100x harder than the doors.  You see, radiators have a ton of nooks and crannies that you just cant get to [at least not easily]

and did i mention that it was heavy?  yeah.  like 450 pounds worth of heavy.  every time we moved it our lives [and toes] were in danger.

the chemical stripper wasnt working, so we switched to a manual method [which proved to be the breakthrough moment]: a heavy wire brush on the end of a high powered drill!   it was, at the very least, a much more manly way to take paint off a heavy metal object [no disrespect to our stripping fluid with the fresh citrus scent]

so after 2 weekends [spaced about 2 months apart] we finally finished the radiator.  and it looks great.  the old details really came out once the power drill method got going.

next came a fresh coat of metallic spray paint and then creating a "platform" for the radiator to sit on from one of the original old wood joists.  [more salvaged material!]

take a look at the finished work here