The Call of the Wood

Been fixing up and painting the bathroom door since Sunday. Don't know about you, but when I'm doing a job as mindless as painting, my hand might be painting but my mind is otherwise engaged. Plotting The Literary Novel (as it's recently become known in my head), or testing out snippets of conversation between the main characters (or even minor ones come to that), or generally wool-gathering.

Something of the manual activity has patently impinged on my consciousness though, manifesting itself in two painting-related gatherings of wool. 1: how stripped doors sound attractive until you actually see them, and 2: how I'm probably bringing these doors full circle (or actually, more like 540°, because clearly being wood, they started life as... well... bare wood).

I like stripped wood as a rule. A few (umm... probably about 12) years ago I took a hot-air stripper and a shave-hook to the wooden window casings in the main bedroom of the family cottage, gradually revealing the mellow silkiness of their ancient yellow pine, but it was a task to remove all evidence of old repairs - every last lump and grain of filler - sand the wood to a fine smooth finish and then apply copious quantities of beeswax-based polish to feed and nurture the wood until it gleamed. The end result soon dulled the memory of the hours of exhausting, boring stripping, sanding and buffing.

The previous owners of this house had an altogether more slapdash approach to their stripped wood. As far as I can tell it involved a quick dunk in a bath of chemical stripper and... er... that's yer lot. For the most part, this left the doors looking rough and ill-treated. Exposed splits and cracks in the old timber, long clumps of old grey filler in the spaces between the carcass and the mouldings, lines of yellowed dots where the filled nail heads lived, and all the long years' scratches and gouges in full view. And then, to add insult to injury, they'd painted on a wash of disgusting blue woodstain that gave them, if anything, an even sadder and more forlorn aspect.

Quite the most depressing example of stripped wood I'd ever seen and one of the earliest mental notes I made during our first visit to the house. Hence Thought #1 above.

Thought #2, bubbling into view as the brush turned the dirty matt effect into smooth fresh white, is the realisation that all I'm doing is returning the doors to the state they'd more than likely been in when the previous owners first arrived. All trace of the expense of the chemical dipping, and the splashing on of dishwaterlike stain, will soon be erased. Makes me wonder if, at some remote future point, a new owner of this house will have an urge for stripped doors and set to to re-undo all my hard work. No wonder B&Q (aka Home Depot) profits remain healthy.