The first day of my paint-stripping project could have started out terribly. Since I was using highly toxic, industrial-strength chemicals, I had purchased some chemical gloves at Lowes. I used them last week for my trial run of paint stripping, then stored them away in the backyard.

Well, this morning I picked up the gloves and was about to put them on when I remebered something. Recently there have been quite a few black widow spiders around our house (which I’ve seen and killed), neighborhood (which I’d heard about), and city (I killed 2 at church already). So I decided to look inside the gloves first.

THANK GOD I DID!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Dude, putting my hand in there would have angered that black widow like no other, and I would have been bitten for sure!

Drama aside, I made some serious progress today, in eight hours of work:

(what it looks like while stripping)

Pretty good progress! You can still see remnants of the last 2 layers of brown and green paints. I’ll have to buy more chemicals and return to this project on Friday… I still have to sand out the nooks and crannies, and strip the tops of the posts, and the board running along their base.