mission brown paint

l live an a 50's style brick home that was nicely repainted in the 70's with mission brown paint !! the doors are no problem as l'm just going to get new ones , but all the door frames and skirtings are also in this stuff , gack !! whats the best way to remove it ? l want to get it back to the natural timber colour if it's possible . l was thinking heat gun and scrapers , but is this too tedious not to mention toxic ? any hints would be greatly appreciated

Ohh Yummmmm....

I look forward to the answers as I have the same problem but mines a 70's house and get this - they repainted it in mission brown last year to help sell it. Go figure, so I have 2 coats of the dam stuff and lots of it is over orgean beams.!!!!
I have not tried anything yet, but I'm thinking heat gun, paint stripper and sanding is going to be my options and repaint with a new colour the areas that do not want as timber again.
Steve

what are people thinking * slaps forehead*...tho l guess it worked because you bought the house !!!

l have a feeling a lot of elbow grease is going to be required , especially because the paint is enamel , l'm just praying that it's not lead based , tho l do leadlighting anyway so l should already have plenty in the blood stream , whats a little more !!

Nope the new brown paint was not an endearing factor of the house.
But lucky for me my paint is ater based. and they missed lots of spots and only painted bit's here adn there to "touch it up" Very easy to see waht they had tried to do.

re your paint - I'd take a scraping to a paint shop and have it checked out for having lead in it.
while leadlighting is dangerous as you would know, a mate of mine had to give it up as a full time job due to an allergic reaction to it.

And vapourised lead paint fumes are far worse than moulding the stuff around glass.
Don't be casual about it - as it tends to be not good for the brain cells.
Steve

Assuming all is ok with the paint its going to take a little elbow grease, Your going to need to sand it back and then use paint stripper.

I wouldn’t advice you to strip paintwork down. Sometimes stripping works, but more often it’s not.

Sounds like your doors are quite old and probably have quite a few layers of paint. There very likely to be small cracks in the timber that are filed with paint. If it is so – you might never get out. Think twice if it worth putting in so much work to expose old a damaged timber and possible patched halls from old locks.

Other thing to consider… Be realistic to yourself – will you have enough patience to strip all doors and not to stop half way through? It very sad to see people who put so much work in, just to stop in the middle of the job. If you think you can do it – do it, but promise you will not stop until you finish the work!

My advice – get a good sanding machine and spent time sending the doors and filing the gaps. Paint it in light semi gloss paint (gloss shows imperfections and mat looks dated). You will be surprised how good your doors will look.

thanks for the advice , but it's only the door frames and skirtings l want to remove the paint from , the doors are pretty old and not worth saving , particularly as l want to put in doors that have window panels to allow more light into the passageway rather than get a sky light which l don't think look attractive.

l'm still leaning towards a heat gun and sanding , l've used paintstripper before and yeah , it's time consuming and rather messy and l didn't get very good results.

Just make sure you run a lead paint test before stripping paint of! You can get it from Bunnings or a paint shops.

Many pre-1978 properties were painted at some stage with lead containing paint. It’s a serious health hazard.
You can read more about it here: http://ol-painting.blogspot.com/2009/09/lead-paint-leads-to.html#links

I also had a house with mission brown windows, I found that the stripper and heat gun simply softens the paint and it works further into the grain of the timber. Invest in a good sander. With the skirting boards, I removed all of mine with a mould bar specially designed to removing skirting boards without damaging them. I then sanded them back and stained and clear coated while they were off the wall. When I reapplied them, I used a coloured putty to match the stain and then applied a final clear coat over all. They came up really well and it was a lot easier working with them on the saw horse at waist level than crawling around the floor. No easy option for the door frames just sanding.
I hope this is of assistance.