How We Are Refinishing Our Woodwork ~Part 1 (removing the woodwork)

When we decided to take our walls down, we also decided to take the woodwork down with them figuring it would be easier to refinish them off of the walls.

This job ended up falling to me since I seem to have been given a greater amount of patience than Tim.

Tools of choice:

• a good heavy hammer
• a large pry bar for the bases and downstairs crowns
• a "regular" sized crow bar for the casings and other smaller trim pieces
• black Sharpe markers
• nippers
• dremel tool with cutting wheel attachments
• 5 gallon bucket
• my brute strength you little girlie men (said as Arnold)

To take each piece down I placed the head of the crow bar against the wood, hammered it in behind the piece, and then pulled like crazy.

Ease of removal seemed to vary by room. Rooms like the master bedroom and bathroom were a cinch. In the dining room, office, and guest bedroom the plaster behind the boards had rotten to the point that I had to take many "sanity breaks" during the removal process. Also the oak downstairs came off much easier than the fir.

As I took each piece down I labeled each one on the back-side with a black Sharpe. At the time I was scared to death that it would not stand up the the chemicals I would use, but it turns out the little bit of stripper that ends up on the back of the pieces does not remove the mark. I also had digital pictures of all of the trim in the room and I labeled those pictures with the same marks as the woodwork. That way I knew the starting points in the room.

Once the pieces were down and marked I used a pair of nippers to pull out the millions of nails that the builders and PO's had placed in the pieces. If brute strength did not work on a particular nail I brought out the big guns and used the cutting wheel attachment on a dremel. The nails went in the 5 gallon bucket to be taken out to the dumpster at the end of the day.

Becky's words of advise: Have planned out a protected perment space (not in the house) where you are going to store the boards before you begin the removal process. For some reason we did not think it would be very much work to move around the woodwork for an 18 room house. Boy were we WRONG!

***Warning: Woodwork was one of the first projects we started to tackle. Everything we have done has been based on local advise/trial-and-error. Yes, I have regrets. Please don't yell at us for being ignorant.