Stair Stripping - a work in progres

After refinishing the floors on the third floor of our house - lots of chemical stripper, layers of paint, renting sanding equipment... - I needed a break before thinking about attempting to refinish any more wood surfaces in our house. I thought I had waited long enough (almost 2 years) but I may have been wrong since I seem to be dragging my feet with my latest project. I was inspired to refinish the front entry which includes the staircase up to our apartment after we got the house painted this year. This nice new paint on the outside and then walking in to this entry that needs work made the exterior a little anti-climactic so I went to work. 

It feels a bit like a joke to me that the previous owners seem to have taken places where there was beautiful natural wood and then painted them to look like wood. The top coat of paint on our third floor was brown. When you look closely at the paint in the entry you can see that it was painted to look like wood grain. My first attempt was with chemical stripper that we had left. It was effective in a few places but most places came out like the photo on the left where the top layer came up but the white primer type paint that was put down first is still down. 

The second attempt was much more successful, the use of a multi-tool with a scraping blade attachment. And hand scrapping tools. 

Our goal is for the front entry floor, newel posts, stair treads and banisters to be restored to natural wood. The balusters, risers and trim will all be painted white. All the work of stripping the paint layers was getting a bit discouraging and I was beginning to lose sight of this project ending and being glad I started it so I sanded and primed the parts to be painted white. 

Seeing the change some primer makes has restored my energy to keep moving on this project and get excited about this space. All good things since we do have tenants I also want them to be able to see that we are moving forward on this and they are not going to have to be entering a dusty mess for too much longer.