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It is amazing how paint in century homes can defy bubbling, cracking and wear and tear. As a child I remember the pleasure in finding those hot bubbles of paint that summer sun raised on exterior doors and windows. I remember deliberately popping them as we also popped tar bubble on freshly resurfaced roads. Compare that with the paint inside a century wooden home.

No amount of paint remover, sanding, or death-defying burning off paint could ever really remove that paint. I quit after a whole summer of working on my kitchen when someone told me that those specialty paint burners could set fire to cobwebs behind the wooden walls and set the whole house afire.

No one needed to worry about that. When we cut out walls to replace doors and windows with larger fire doors and double glazed windows those pieces of wall from our double boarded house were some of the best winter kindling we had. Once our wood burning space heater had a bed of hot coals a piece of cut up walll beam, with the bark still edging it, kept the fire toasty till past bedtime.

All our timbers were well seasoned and stood the test of modern methods of paint removal. Now I wonder how that paint was made that it survived so much better than the
modern indoor/outdoor paints I have known all my life.

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