I painted this window myself in 2013.  6 years later the nasty horrible modern gloss paint has cracked and is peeling.   Modern gloss paint is not great for UV light so will crack and let water in.   It is also waterproof so the water can’t evaporate out again.   Modern gloss is not flexible so it first cracks at the joints where you least need water ingress.

Most of the rest of the house is finished in linseed paint and everything painted in 2015 is still perfect and well protected.  Linseed paint never needs stripping as it doesn’t crack.  It just fades (this gloss seems to have faded too) and needs toping up with another coat of linseed every 10 years or so without the need for any preparation.   Linseed oil paint is the plan for this window so I don’t need to restore it every 5 years, but for best results I need to strip the modern paint off the window..

It’s a big old window and I’ve been putting it off.    It’s now just about the only exterior woodwork in the house that hasn’t been stripped and repainted in Linseed paint.

Modern gloss paint is very slow to remove and the profiles are fiddly.   I reckon I’m in for 3 days stripping this window.  But the weather is really nice at the moment.   And it’s really good to chat to meighbours as they pass by my socially distancing scaffold.

Fortunately I don’t have to touch the sill as it appears to be made from cement.  It seems to be functioning OK and not causing other problems so I’m going to leave it alone – whatever wood that remains under the cement can dry to the inside.

I stripped the paint from inside too.   There was an amazing thickness of paint – maybe 2mm on the inside and 5mm in the corners, and all of it had been applied after 1979!   There is a detail photo here.    It wasn’t too bad a job and took a couple of days in total.

The weather forecast isn’t so good next week so I’ll make a start on the secondary glazing before finishing stripping the outside.

It rained all week on and off.    I demolished the bar and then realised the front door could be lifted off it’s hinges and replaced whenever it rained so I decided to strip that too.    It is the original 1920(ish) front door.  The red bit in the middle is a panel that was replaced with plywood maybe around 1990 when the burgundy paint was applied.   The door started off white, went brown, then black, then green, burgundy, then a darker green.   I notice it hasn’t been yellow yet.

The door has survived remarkably well.  Even the very worn weatherboard at the bottom of the door is the original.   The door was re-mounted to hinge at the other side at some point, and the wear on the weatherboard suggests this was perhaps 1/3 of the way into it’s life, so maybe 1950s. A number of hinge arrangements were tried before they settled on the current one.

A few of the mouldings have been replaced and some of them don’t work very well so I’ll need to make some new mouldings that work better with the old ones before painting.   The stained glass has been lost.    Later I’ll do something completely original with that.

It’s a big window and taking a long time to strip.    I had a lovely day in the sunshine talking to neighbours as they walked past.    I haven’t finished stripping the window yet so I can have a lovely day tomorrow too.

Human contact has brightened my mood and I’m thinking about reinstating openers on the end bay windows so I can chat to neighbours who pass by when I’m doing the parquet floor.