Stipping the Skirting

So, it's been a while - and not a lot has happened in honesty.  I am not sure if I mentioned before, but in the kitchen, we have a single tile layer of skirting that matches the floor tiling.  However finding that out was quite an effort, because there are about 7 or 8 layers of paint on the tiles.

Getting the paint off has been a bit of a labour of love.  It took a full weekend to strip about 10 tiles.  So thank f**k there's only about 40 tiles we need to strip (the ones that are going to be behind cabinets will not get the stripping treatment...).

Of course, I took photos of the process - and again, we were using Wickes' paing and varnish stripper for the job.  I don't know if there is something else that might be more effective, and if there is, I'd really love to know about it, because I could do with not spending the rest of my life stripping paint.

(WARNING: the following photos become slightly repetative...)

Original state of the skirting tiles:

After coat 1 of the stripper has been removed:

Coat 2 on the tiles:

After coat 2 of the stripper has been removed:

After coat 3 of the stripper has been removed (first sighting of the red tiles underneath):

Coat 4 on the tiles:

After coat 4 of the stripper has been removed (the blue/green layers):

After coat 5 of the stripper has been removed (it was dark out by this time - hence the different tone to the photo):

And this is after coat 5 and a good scrub:

And finally, after coat 6:

There's a little bit of discolouring which I think is from some sort of product that protects/accentuates the colour of the tiles - and in the picture above the skirting still needs some work, which we've sorted now.  We've also done about another 10 tiles and have started work on stripping the gloss off the window and door frames.  It is a ceaseless job...

And just to round off, here is a paint monster - which I think looks vaguely similar to The Trash Heap from Fraggle Rock.  It also shows many of the colour layers.  You can clearly see the pink layer and a green layer, a yellow layer, a white layer and if you enlarge it, you can see a smidgen of the bright blue on the left hand side.  There was another blue layer and I think a couple more yellow/white layers.  This is not a job I want to have to do again.