In June 2001, my husband, Steve, and I were interested in buying the Homer Talley House, on South Sixth Street, which had previously been the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. The fraternity members had vacated the house, but left considerable detritus in their wake. Farrington’s Grove had organized about 30 neighbors to clean up the house and haul out the remnants of 35 years of fraternity use. Each of us was going about our assigned tasks, tearing out partitions in the attic, hauling elderly couches, chairs and television sets out of various rooms. Todd Nation, a long-time preservationist and now a city councilman, was peeling up indoor/outdoor carpeting in the sunroom and shoveling “stuff” out of a window. Under the old carpeting was what looked like a concrete floor, but Todd leaned over and scratched the surface near a corner of the room with his fingernail. “Look,” he said to me. “I think there’s tile underneath this grey stuff.” Yep. There was. And it looked pretty, too.

A year later, after Steve and I had bought the house, I decided to see what kind of tile was under all that goop in the sun room. Dan Sanders, our neighbor and architect for the renovation of the house, and I talked about how to clean it. Dan experimented with a few solvents and discovered that the stuff covering the tile wasn’t concrete. I tried mineral spirits in one place, let it soak in and then scraped it. I did the same with acetone in another place, then liquid paint stripper and then gel paint stripper. Each time, I poured or spread the chemical in a place far away from the previous experiment. I had no idea what would happen if those chemicals mixed. Maybe I’d blow up the house or asphyxiate myself at the very least. As Dan had suggested, I covered the places with thin plastic – actually, I think I used Kroger bags; that’s probably significant – and let the process work for 30 minutes or so. Then I’d come back and scrape the area with a paint scraper. I discovered two things: the gel paint stripper worked the best and beautiful terra cotta tile in a stylized floral pattern was hidden under the “grey stuff.”

For the next couple months I drove in to the house from where we were living, armed with gallon cans of gel stripper, mineral spirits, a four-inch paint scraper, a nylon scrub brush, rubber gloves, lots of rags, knee pads and a large supply of Kroger bags. Don’t forget the Kroger bags. A radio also was pretty important. Over the time period, I heard Dick Estelle read several books on National Public Radio. I poured the gel stripper over an area about two feet by four feet, spread it evenly with an old paint brush to about a quarter inch thick, and then covered it with the bags. This gel is about the color and consistency of egg whites. Doesn’t smell like egg whites, though. After letting it sit for a half hour or so, I scraped it and shoveled up the black, granular, tarry sand that came up. If I’d gotten everything right, the consistency was a little like scraping thick slush off your windshield in winter. Then I’d vacuum up the crumbs and start scrubbing the tar-stained tile with mineral spirits, the scrub brush and rags – lots of rags. Eventually I got into a rhythm where I was scraping one area while another section was soaking.

The sunroom is about 12 feet by 20 feet so stripping it took a while. By the time I finished, the paint scraper was no longer four inches wide and its corners were decidedly rounded from scraping against the grout. This came in handy, however, for my next foray into stripping. I now had a customized scraping tool for the concave trim of the paneled doors. Of the 27 interior doors we needed, there were 12 that were salvageable and needed to be stripped of their many layers of paint.

The sunroom was about the only room without a hardwood floor where I was out of the way of the real workers. I also figured, hey, I’d stripped that floor once; I could do it again if I messed it up stripping the doors. So I set up saw horses, laid a door on them and went to work.

Again, my Kroger bags proved invaluable. I quickly found that in the words of Diamond Jim Brady, “If you’re not generous with your stripper, she won’t be generous with you.” There were many layers of black, purple, aqua, royal blue, and other lovely colors. I had to pour on enough solvent for it to work through the layers. Of course, initially I’d had to pull out nails, thumb tacks, staples etc. with vise grips and needle-nosed pliers before pouring on the gel. As I scraped off the layers of paint, I’d usually find more nails, thumb tacks and staples that I’d have to pull before repeating the stripping application.

Eventually, when contractors came to the house to find me, they’d ask, “Where’s the stripper?” They were led to my workshop in the sunroom. I did have to strip that tile floor again, by the way. However, it was much easier the second time around.