blooming peonies, withering brain

My peonies finally bloomed! Just thought I'd share these pictures with you because in another day or two there'll be nothing but pink petals on the ground. I really had to crop these pictures judiciously so you can't see how bad the rest of the yard looks. I bought a push blade mower, thought I'd be all environmentally friendly, but I didn't realize that my lawn would resemble a bad buzz cut as a result. Speaking of buzzes, I've been stripping my doors, my God why I ever started this endeavor is beyond me! I started it last week, using my environmentally friendly infrared heatgun type paint remover AND my green soybean stripper gel. Can I just say green stripping must been an oxymoron. My week of nausea (flat out puking one night but that might have been something I ate, so I took a break and spent all of Saturday in bed), fatigue, headaches and stupidity could well attest to that. But since I can never leave a task unfinished I feel like I still must push on, plummeting IQ notwithstanding. And why? I'm probably the only one who will notice the difference. It's like some tortuous compulsion in me, to prune, stain and peel my fingers while doing the neurological equivalent to my brain.

Sooo, here's an example of an easy door, and by easy I mean it's only two panels. Please do click on them and enlarge them so you can really grasp the idiocy of my task, Sisyphus comes to mind. The faux bois on the pine doors, in order to make them look nicer back in the day, is the absolute hardest thing to remove. It's like three different varnishes that all congeal into this mustardy goop that gets everywhere and is so tough to remove. There are six doors like this on the second floor. One and a half down, four and a half to go, waahhh!

Okay now I only have three doors to do on the third floor,piece of cake right. Well they're all five panel doors, which really winds up being ten panel since I do both sides because, you know, the boxes and items in storage would know the difference if I didn't strip the door panel inside the closet. This is where being anal could easily shorten your life. The white door looks fine in the small picture but there are so many layers of paint on these puppies that they are all bumpy and textured and cracking, and not in a good way.

If I don't kill myself with this task I'm thinking of conquering the molding afterward, fortunately there is not that much original molding left. Only our diningroom window (72 inches wide) and the eight doorframes. gulp.