Doorway rosettes and Lowes delivery

 I've been slowly working my way through our house and replacing flooring, painting and we had decided on some more ornate trim for the interior doors (plus paint doors and trim in white).

I completed most of the master bath and master bedroom trim minus some floor trim, rosettes on outside of closet doors and still needed to paint and trim the door to the lanai. I needed more trim and rosettes though - lets call some of my initial attempts "practice work".  Trying to find a good way to quickly/easily strip off the paint from my worse mistakes was a great way to spend money on new tools/accessories, waste time and make a bigger mess with some of the rosettes and door trim. I can't quite get myself to just trash all of them but I did listen to the advise of my wonderful wife and father as well - order new stuff so I can just get it done.

This is good advice but even it comes with problems. I used the "pick up at store" option for the door trim since this time I couldn't find a way to get free shipping.  The trim that was waiting for me at the store was the correct trim but the people picking don't really check the items for quality so some had a number of spots I had to fill with wood putty and sand before I can do much.

For the top corner pieces for the doors, I was able to order and get free shipping - in fact, it didn't offer me an option for pickup at store because it looks like it had to come from a nearby store instead of my normal location.  What I ordered are pieces with a flower shape - what I ended up getting was a mix of the flower shape (bottom of below picture) and a different shape.  I was perplexed at first and then realized that the "wrong" items actually are marked with the same item/model # as the correct ones.  So if someone just had a bunch of these face down and sticker up - they would get a random selection of the 2 items.  I need to contact Lowes to correct this - hope next time it works out correct.  Fortunately, this isn't that important in the grand scheme of life so not really a big deal.

And just in case this helps someone else; I had used a mix of latex paint and polyurethane which I had sprayed the initial trim and rosettes with.  A low odor, weaker paint stripper didn't work great.  Nor does a soda blaster work great in this case.  A drill with brass or steel wire wheel works but can damage the trim and effectively remove detail from the rosettes pretty quickly.  With the grooves in the trim and the details in the rosettes - it is hard to scrape in an effective fashion.  For the door trim, a drill with a nylon wheel actually worked pretty well and was less prone to damaging the wood.   For the rosettes, I'm slowly (trying to fix) some of them with a file (to recreate the grooves) and picked up a small wood carving set as well (i.e. used the opportunity to justify the need for a few more small tools).  For now, I'll focus on doing a better job spraying the new rosettes now that I know what works/doesn't..   Don't paint anything when the temps and humidity are high..

The end result is supposed to look like the picture below - note that I still have a bit of caulking/filler and touch up painting to do.

Below is a pic from the outside of the same door prior to putting up the door trim and rosettes - end result after adding trim is pretty much like the above picture.

Thanks for reading..

Scott