The long, slow stress-busting way to strip paint

I have been scraping paint off my stairs for nearly two years now. Not full-time, I hasten to reassure. It is not some sort of hard labour. Or indeed madness, which a colleague suspected when I told him I had gone home the night before and countered hours sitting at the computer by peeling paint off the staircase. Silence . . . until it dawned. “Not new paint,” I said. He looked relieved that I hadn’t just confessed to destressing by wantonly attacking my décor with a knife after a long day at the office.

If anything, my paint-peeling is soft labour and an example of decorating without any stress whatsoever.

This isn’t about not getting around to decorating – it is consistent. The rest of my home – bought with no heating system, bathroom or kitchen – was made habitable by builders, friends, family and me. Everything was done except the stairs which were filthy, tolling with nails and staples and layers of primer, emulsion and gloss paint, telling tales of repeated applications and changes of carpet, every new revamp pasted on top of the old. The wood was gasping and sweating – and in places composting to black dust – beneath the paint sandwich, while nails punctured its integrity. It was time for a thorough strip.

For all our advanced technology, humans have not come up with a decent method for removing paint. You can sand it, melt it with a heat gun, douse it in chemical-stripper or, if it’s a standalone item, dip it in acid. Or you can take the slow road with various metal scrapers. Pay someone to do that and it will cost about €265,000 in hours of labour.

Perfect bliss

Of course I could have added another a new coat but the stairs wouldn’t wear it well and an element of perfectionism had taken hold of me at this stage. My stairs were going to be smoother than a lounge lizard.

"I notice you like to keep a mole-wrench handy," said a visitor, pointing to the accoutrements on my windowsill, which also include a Stanley knife and various scrapers picked up in budget shops and DIY stores, in search of the elusive ace.

Perfectionism that must be achieved against a tight deadline involves stress, whereas perfectionism pursued into infinity sits as a calm backdrop to the rest of a madly busy life – promising that everything is going to be all right in the end. Just work away, no rush. So the scrapers and wrench sit about ready to be picked up when I feel like it, to flick up stubborn bits of paint left after the big sheets of easy-peelers have been satisfying pulled off. I have a theory that those clingy bits find it harder to hang on once their flaky neighbours have been stripped away, leaving them hanging on more precariously. People going up and down the stairs also kick them about and chip them off in a case of natural progression.

It is meditative, sitting halfway up the stairs picking away, entertained by thoughts, music or the radio. While, for me, this a long, anxiety-free road to perfectionism, with the bonus of stress-busting scraping, tugging and bashing, it would be the opposite for others. Some will rush to judge themselves or others stemming from ingrained conditioning that everything in life needs to be finished asap. The accusation of “laziness” will spring to their mouths. But just as it’s lazy to take your time, it’s also lazy to paint on another layer.

Others, who need order in their home lives to counter real and perceived chaos elsewhere – in their family, at work, in a world where people kill and the economy rules – will find undone parts of their homes too unsettling.

But just as it’s stressful to live with chaos on the stairway to heaven, it can also be stressful to create fake deadlines and neatness.

Slow-decorating movement

There is a whole slow-decorating movement on the furniture front, peopled by those who will wait for the right sofa or flea-market find and live with gaps in their homes until the perfect piece turns up. Not for them the matchy-matchy complete look from decorating all in one go – 10 shades of neutral perhaps – in a personality-free trend that may well blow over in a decade.

I could paint those stairs in a hour, over bumps and curves. I could tip paint stripper all over them and douse my house in toxic chemicals that won’t break down for a few centuries. I could strip it with a heat gun and leaden my lungs with good old-fashioned paint fumes. But I’m enjoying the journey.

Years ago when I moved into a house with a garden full of weeds, a neighbour told me to tip weedkiller all over them. Instead I created a border and a lawn and those elements mulched away the weeds naturally and the soil got to keep the organisms that help make our planet work beautifully. Planet Earth seems to like things done slowly, rather than being burnt and flooded and poisoned in a rush to advancement. And sometimes we can sit with that.