A nice distraction

Farm house and 2 storey garage

We got a little distracted recently when the opportunity popped up to remove some bits from my father-in-law’s child hood home.  The building, which is over a hundred years old, has seen several decades pass since it was someone’s home.  The avant-garde lean on the two storey garage provides a visual queue as to what will probably happen next.

Front veranda



One of the treasures we picked up was the original front door, with glass intact.  The plan is to ultimately incorporate it into our home.  But in the meantime it’s safely ensconced in the shed with the other treasures; 30 metres of skirting, 8 metres of pine handrail, 2 mantle pieces, 10 square metres of pressed tin ceiling (didn't I say I'd never do old tin again?) and a couple of light switches.

 

Front door

It was sad to see what had once been a modest but much loved farm house looking so dilapidated. Its broken windows had let in a flock of starlings and an apparently incontinent possum, while cattle had pushed over veranda posts in the quest for the ultimate back scratch. 

 

But despite the obvious neglect there was still a nice ambiance to the place as it almost appeared to recline amongst the old trees, occasional clump of jonquils and remnants of a picketed garden fence.

 

 

 

 

 

(de) Pressed Tin

Before, during and after

After restoring 10 sheets of antique pressed tin for our bathroom ceiling I feel that I'm somewhat of an authority on the subject.  At least on the topic of how to prepare and paint the stuff - but it did take some experimentation.



Plan A for ridding the decades of paint, dirt and unidentifiable gunk was a wire brush on an electric drill.  15 seconds later I'd only melted the layers into a very robust, potentially Nobel prize winning composite that adhered to the tin better than ever.  I changed tack and resorted to plan B, the 600c hot air gun.

 

This also worked to consolidate the surface into a single layer; much like a slice of cheese, but in contrast to plan A it weakened the grip between the tin and the surface.  But if I overheated it I ended up with something more like butter than cheddar, which was easier to spread but decidedly harder to remove, especially once it became cold.

Whilst effective the hot air gun was tediously slow and incredibly messy as it took a few passes to remove the melted goo completely.  Two sheets along it dawned on me that perhaps a combination of the two approaches, hot air and wire wheel, might work. 

So after some more fiddling I came up with the following modus operandi which was about 30% quicker than relying on just the hot air gun:

• Heat an area of about 30cm x 30cm until the finish just starts to bubble (cheese not butter).  This weakened the connection between the tin and the coating.
• Allow to cool for a couple of minutes.  This resulted in the surface becoming very brittle.
• Scrape the surface with the back of a chisel.  For me this removed around 90% of the paint and made far less mess than the wire brush did when it flicked chips at 257km/h all over the shop.
• Run over the remainder with the drill/wire brush combo.  The resulting surface was 99.9% clean – or better.

Including the subsequent panel beating and applications of rust converter, red oxide primer and undercoat each sheet took hours and hours to prepare.

 

Have I mentioned I’m not going to recycle a pressed tin ceiling again?

The right tin to do

We've long liked the idea of a pressed tin ceiling for our bathroom and loo.  In fact, we had planned for it from the start, or at least we thought we had.  The hiccough we hadn't anticipated was the cost of freight - which brought the cost of materials to well over $1,500 before installation and finishing.  We really couldn't bring ourselves to spend that much and there didn't seem to be any viable second hand alternatives around.

 

We'd resigned ourselves to a garden variety plaster ceiling when I mentioned it to my brother.  Stagger me if it didn't turn out that he had a house worth of pressed tin that he had picked up 30 years ago from a demolition in our home town, Grenfell.  Not only did it have provenance (last century the owner had been my pre-school teacher) the price was right.  All he wanted was a set of white rear louvers for a 1956 FC Holden sedan.  How hard could that be?

 

With hindsight, the price was very much higher (and I still haven't found those louvers) .  Each sheet had three coats of enamel paint which needed removing along with 80 years of dust on the upper side.  All rust had to be treated, edges radiused and dents panel beaten.  Then followed an undercoat of red oxide primer and 3 top coats of white gloss.  Total time per sheet - don't even ask, but suffice to say that's two weeks of my life I won't get back!

Pressed tin in the bathroom

 

Installing it brought its own challenges, particularly for two vertically challenged builders like Jeanette and I.  But I have to say the end result is just what we were after.

 

We still have the cornice to go - I'm wondering about carving an egg and dart design into Tassie Oak. But I hope I talk myself out of it!