Best practice for restoring wood trim before painting

FWIW I recently painted an entire prewar house and it turned out pretty darn good. If you wanted to say there may be areas that need special attention, I’d agree, but cutting back the entire surface with sandpaper is definitely not what I’d do here, particularly with the lead hazard. I have no doubt steve is a better painter than I am. He knows way more about paint and has much more experience, and probably the lead levels to prove it. He sands between every coat of paint and he probably primes even painted surfaces, and he says his brushed on coatings are almost as flat as a spray finish. And on my doors that I just finished stripping, I’ll probably try my best to do as he suggested. But painting over a massive amount of installed trim and wainscotting is never gonna look perfect. The mouldings definition will be lost to paint build up, and you’ll drive youself nuts trying to sand out every imperfection. And if the underlayers are poorly adhered, all that work will be for naught anyway. Good luck sanding tiny profiles or beads on the wainscotting with a 1×4. A deglosse r will make quick work of that and you won’t have to worry about the lead.

But let me do you a favor. You have my endorsement to leave a few drips or runs that crummy 20th century painters slapped on there if they’re not too visible. Don’t kill yourself or get lead poisoning over that, it’s not going to bother you or substantially change the appearance of your home, and you can do a better job next time. Besides it’s part of the story of your house. Perhaps in the future you’ll strip it back anyway.

The only painted woodwork on our house was in the kitchen. Many paint coats obscured the details. When we had it painted (and skim coated) three years ago we had the wood trim roughly stripped, using a peel-away stripper which, I hope, minimized the lead danger. We didn’t need the painstaking final steps of removing all the paint from crevices, since we were remaining. After priming and painting with BM Aura semi-gloss it looked (and still looks) pretty good.

REPAINTING, not remaining

Well urbandad, glad to see you have a pair.

urbandad, i have hired a lot of people who have worked on houses of their own, usually friends who are between jobs, and these are smart people who have done a lot. the only thing they have is that i know they are capable. but they know nothing and if left alone they go down the wrong road or they tell me how they want to try this or that only because they do not know what really works and when they were working on their own house they made the mistake of listening to a babbling fool in an orange apron. they are still learning and do not know the shortest route to anywhere and in a business we have to KNOW what to do when we look at it, we can’t be fumbling around trying to figure things out that we have been doing for 20 years as we look for that “silver bullet”.

homeowners tend to think that every fix comes in a can. i have had to explain this to staff: any time you introduce an unnecessary step or product into a job you risk slowing it down and also risk some other accident occuring (in this case, spilling a can of deglosser). i have to beat this li ne of thinking into their heads until they realize there is a very proven and direct way to get something done and it generally means work. op has to sand this lightly anyway due to other issues, that is where op should leave it.

you remind me of one of those employees who know a lot but cannot focus. they are finally getting to put their hands to something and then they think of all the products they have seen on TV or read about in Fine Woodworking they spend more time telling me how we can do this and that and i end up telling them – “focus on the work and we can talk about that later over a beer”. and they go on and on with the next step in the process and i tell them “focus” and this continues until one day i tell them “i have been doing doors for 15 years, this is how we do them” and then i tell them to “shut up”. they will spend more time talking about how we could be doing it some other way and less time doing it the way we should be doing it.

others will not know what i am talking about here, but you came on here some weeks back, before your hiatus, and someone had been looking for a place to purchase molding from Garden State. the post was pulled and i have no idea why, but Garden State is a supplier of lower price pine molding (richmond hill lumber has it, riverhead carries it, metropolitan). it is the kind of molding that working class people (my family) put in their houses and if someone is looking for garden state product, we have to FOCUS on that and address that because to do otherwise might be a real slap in the face to someone who cannot afford to have custom knives made. instead of answering their question, which i was attempting to do when the post got pulled, you run on about custom knives as if you heard about custom knives for the first time last week. to do something like that to someone who is shopping for a budget product reeks of something horrible in our society. where is your head?

you remind me of one of the employees i hire who are real smart and read but are all over the place and cannot focus because they are learning so much new stuff that they had no idea existed even the day before that they want to find some “better” way to do everything i have been doing since before i went to college and as a result they cannot focus and end up spewing a lot of nonsense along the way. correct nonsense, but not necessary nonsense. it leads people down the wrong path.

I apologize, I made a mistake and posted bad advice. I did not see the picture attachment to squibsie’s post, and I withdraw the suggestion to use liquid deglosser or a drywall screen. On the white section, there’s zero chance of getting a good result with a liquid deglosser. On the brown section maybe, I can’t really see it well, but if what you’re dealing with is mostly like the white section, you’re definitely going to have to do some serious work. Frankly, I would not try to paint over that, but if steve says it can be done I’m sure he’s right. Can it be done lead safe though?

I like Bob’s peel away suggestion. Perhaps some sections could be removed for offsite stripping

By the way, I tested the older off white paint on that panel for lead and it came back negative. Might be because it was originally unpainted in the original state and people painted it years later. Other trim around some windows came back positive FYI so the test seems to be valid.

We used Peel away on one area but I didn’t repeat. It was messy and sanding is cheaper and faster. I haven’t gone back and read every reply to your posy but I believe Steve (the expert) is suggesting sanding.