Spare room decorating: Day 1

My last week's holiday starts today and the goal is to complete redecoration of the spare bedroom - the smallest room in the house (besides the smallest room, of course!). It's a bit of a test case in two respects. Firstly I'll be investigating the most effective way of removing the metallic gloss paint from off the picture rail.

We have this in most rooms of the house - it's one of the ubiquitous and idiosyncratic décor features beloved of the previous owners. We've kept it in the lounge (for now) but up here I'm going to see what it looks like with a more traditional white satin finish. This particular room has a gold rail but we also enjoy copper and bronze rails in other rooms.

The other experiment involves lining paper, but more of that later. Today's job is to strip the picture rail and I'm all set up with a can of Nitromors, a pile of wire wool, some white spirit and a pair of heavy duty rubber gloves. One small drawback is the fact that the bedroom window is painted shut so I can't get as much ventilation in the room as I'd like when using Nitromors. Nevertheless I began on a two-foot section by the door, painting the solution on as instructed and waiting five minutes. I spent those five minutes on the computer in another room in deference to the fumes! The next part of the procedure is to work another thick coat of Nitromors into the loosened paint on top of the previous coat, stippling the paint with the brush. I have to say it looks like the brush I'm using will be ruined so I'm glad I chose a cheap one for the job, and I'm also a little concerned at the globs of Nitromors-soaked paint that are falling onto the skirting board and blistering the sleeving on the telephone wire tacked down there.

After a further twenty minutes soaking, the blistered gloopy mixture is ready to be scraped off (carefully!) with a shavehook, revealing the bare wood. Except the wood isn't completely bare - it has several small sections where the paint has not been completely lifted from the surface, so according to the instructions I have to go over this again with coarse wire wool soaked in Nitromors. More mess, more fumes! I'm not enjoying this.

After scraping the rest of the mess off I went over the section again with more wire wool, this time soaked in white spirit. I have to say this is not the most rapid process - it's taken me two hours to clean off two feet of rail (it's the small white section in this picture, which also shows the interesting original rag rolling on the walls) and it's not been pretty. The room is full of carcinogens, the floor is covered in chemical waste and the rail still doesn't look especially clean. If I was intending to varnish onto bare wood it would need more processing but luckily I'll be painting it.

Having wasted so much time on this I decided to "blow torch" the rest using a hot-air stripper and the next two hours saw me stripping off almost twelve feet of rail. Much more effective and a much better finish. I think the rest of the Nitromors can will be relegated to stripping small sections of detailed moulding, if I ever have any. With the picture rail stripped bare, it was time to start scraping and filling the cracks in the ceiling, but I soon realised this was more of a job than it looked.