New Year's

"So, how was your New Year break?"

Well, apart from having a lovely New Year's party at some friends place (the kids stayed up to 12 midnight. Boy were they grumpy the next day!), most of it was spent scraping paint off window frames.

You can see the frames here:



The window frames are cedar, and were previously coated in polyurethane. But over time the sun has attacked it, and in places, the coating has come off and left bare wood. Bare cedar in the weather isn't good. It starts rotting very fast, so out with them paint scrapers!

I'm using a hot air gun, and nasty paint stripping chemicals, but it still takes a lot of physical work. In particular, cedar is a very soft wood (you can mark it with your fingernail), so it's hard to get the coating off without damaging the timber.

I've stripped about half the frame. Once it's all stripped, I'm going to paint it with timber oil. It'll need reapplying every year, but it will rot-proof the timber.

Lest it all seem like too much hard work, one nice consolation is that I'm surrounded by the lovely smell of cedar. Quite satisfying.