But all those hooks in the coat closet looked like a lot of trouble to paint around, and we got the idea to unscrew everything. Was this going to involve paint stripper? No! I looked it up on the internet, and it turns out what you need is a crockpot. So we did unscrew all the window and closet hardware — 30 items, plus over 100 screws — and cook them overnight in water and Dawn detergent.
As promised, the old paint slipped off... along with mysterious dark brown goo. Then there was a lot of scrubbing with scouring powder to try to bring up something of a sheen. That worked on the closet hooks (which had sat in the dark for 99.99% of the 100 years) but the window hardware resisted our efforts, and so I ordered some brass polish.
Now, here's what Amazon has generated some suggestions of other things it thinks might go along with my endeavors:
Headstone cleaner!
Our cleaning interests are restricted to this old house, so I found it a little spooky for Amazon to guess I'd be cleaning gravestones, but much respect to those people who do clean gravestones. Like this woman:
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55 comments:
We did that crock pot trick on our 90 year old condo hardware in Chicago. It does work!
Added benefit: it may improve the next beef stew you prepare in the pot.
If the pieces are the right size for it, you might use a case tumbler with cleaning or polishing media, depending on the finish you want. I use one with crushed walnut shells to clean clarinet keys without a lot of labor. I buy good old horns for next to nothing, then I overhaul them and give them away. First the case tumbler, then a quick polish, then ultrasonic to clean all the media off. Does the job.
Busy hands are happy hands.
We used our crock pot to cook some meat mistakenly put in our grocery bag we picked up curbside at WalMart. We figured the meat had to be at least 70 years old. Added some Dawn to that as well and aside from the brown goo that came out, it was delicious, though a bit gamey.
doesn't Everyone have some graves in their basements? I admit; MINE Don't have headstones ;)
Soaking in water and then scraping with a plastic dish scraper does a serviceable job without scratching the metal, but it's good to know there's an easier better way.
Use brasso. yes it's a real product, anyone who served time in the military would be familiar.
Lead paint in your crock pot... and your hot water pipes?
Some might need the Headstone Cleaner, Disinfectant and Deodorizer.
It's for when people have been pissing on your grave.
“Hey, hey, hey, calm down, you two. New Shimmer is both a floor wax and a dessert topping! ”
Brasso works really well. I will never forget it’s smell or the way it felt on my fingers. Memories from the military 60s.
Cloter Lee sounds like an anti-vaxxer.
"Added benefit: it may improve the next beef stew you prepare in the pot."
We will never use that for food again.
I suspect the brown goo was shellac, it was pretty common as a technique to keep pot-metal brass "brassy" just to coat it with something reasonably clear to slow oxidation. I suspect this was more to keep it looking nice until it got to the customer, but unless the product was regularly polished or was prepped for another finish it would remain on all except the wear areas.
A modern thing that one might consider using for the same purpose is a spray-can of matte clear polyureathane. Personally, I like the look of brass switchplates and hinges that are left to develop patina naturally -- and for door handles and such it is actually antibacterial to leave them "raw".
Anyone concerned about using a crock-pot for non-food items and any contamination that might leave might wish to use "crock pot liners" for such non food uses. I'm content to just wash the crock after . . .
One of the perks of getting married late in life is finding that your spouse has done a clean-up and donated the "kitchen appliances" that were "in the garage for some reason". Then you get to negotiate using the kitchen electric carving knife for the next upholstery-foam project, and the kitchen crock-pot for the hardware and auto-part cleaning. At least they had come quite inexpensively from a thrift-store in the first place.
The key is to heat up the part. Either in a crock pot,(brilliant idea. Everyone has one of those.) I like to use a 50/50 Simple Green solution and an untrasonic cleaner.
Dip the brass parts in CLR? Should take the tarnish off without a lot of rubbing. Rinse in clewan water after.
Brasso is readily available. I've seen it Publix.
What a positive way to recover from your heartache.
Making others happy.
I ordered the brand I linked to. Of course I know the brand name Brasso. The brand my parents used was Noxon, which sounds like a portmanteau of Nixon and toxic. I probably made my selection based on the look of the packaging, but what else is there.
I saw home recipes for brass cleaner that involved making a paste out of vinegar and baking soda or vinegar and *flour*, but we'd already tried soaking the things in vinegar and that had no effect.
Now do a search for 'knob polisher.'
Lol Ann...kudos on letting everyone know that you consigned that crockpot to industrial purposes (not food) after cooking your brass fixtures in it! I suspect many readers wouldn't know about that. I have a small dedicated crock pot for cleaning some of my minerals and rocks...I cook many in just cleaning vinegar and water to remove surface mineralization or clean dirt from the crevices. While vinegar is safe, the minerals that leach off from the stones leaves a visible scum line inside...that is not safe for food production once it is used this way!
YouTube has been a godsend for my handyman jobs the last 10 years. Tricks like this have made it easy to repair all kinds of little things that need done on 100 year old house, with a 70s remodel. The handymen themselves are aging out of the workforce. There should be a project to get them all to record their little tricks of the trade before...undergoing the headstones.
Some people need the big family-size bottle.
I'm glad to hear that finally something good came out of a Crockpot.
So, what about using and instapot instead?
State Of The Althouse: “The old paint has grown weaker not stronger. Name me a colonial brass hardware who would change places with a Baldwin Style Handleset,” Althouse shouted. “Name me one! Name me one!”
Another for Brasso. Works great...use a toothbrush...and smells great too.
Are you getting ready to sell your house? I remember a few years back when you were contemplating other locations.
I'm lazy. I just bought some new hardware (rosettes) for my painted over doors.
Goo Be Gone
Tangentially, I had used the "Find a Grave" app to track down some graves as part of a family genealogy project, and I saw that it supported uploading photos of gravestones. When I've visited graves of my own family members, I've made a habit of taking photos of neighboring graves and uploading them. It's something that people who live far away often appreciate.
Separately, I came across a volunteer project to upload photographs of British Commonwealth veteran graves elsewhere. There are more than a handful of such graves in the USA. If you're interested in adding to the collection, you can find more information at https://www.twgpp.org.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission is another interesting site. Although the CWGC site is not soliciting photographs at this time, if you want to search for Commonwealth graves anywhere in the world, the CWGC site is the place to go. Of course, there is a similar site for the American Battle Monuments Commission.
Having done all of this several times myself, I have come around to the idea that it is cheaper and easier to just replace the closet hooks. There are places like Restoration Hardware and other manufacturers making quality replica hardware these days. Not necessarily cheap, but when you factor in the work, it is the way to go.
You can also just stick the parts in a vat of paint stripper. But keep the windows open and don't get it on you. Nasty stuff!
I hope you took some of your extra paint and painted “do not use for food” on the crock pot’s side. I can see a set of circumstances where it gets donated to Good Will or some comparable charity.
Dawn was the surfactant of choice to clean up the hydrocarbon mess left from the Deepwater Horizon blowout. For some reason, the surfactants in Dawn work particularly well at a lot of different things. But it must have been a little weird hooking up 300 gallon tote-tanks of the stuff to the dispersant sprayers on all those boats.
One of my former Eagle Scouts cleaned over 400 headstones in our veterans' cemetery for his project. The marble is very delicate and the VA has pretty stringent requirements. They came out amazing!
We found a good method for cleaning our parents' granite headstones. Rinse with a battery powered pressure washer. Lay paper towels over the front surface (in our case it sits at an angle) and soak eith full strength bleach. Let sit for about 15 minutes. Scrub with a stiff plastic bristle brush, then spray again with the pressure washer. If you do the soaking part correctly, all the moss, lichen and mowing debris rolls out in the final spray.
"Are you getting ready to sell your house? I remember a few years back when you were contemplating other locations."
We want to be in a position to sell easily if we find a better place where we want to live.
But that might not happen and the work is also for us. It's a way to focus on getting things done that you yourself will enjoy.
Also, as we get older, it will be harder and harder, perhaps, to do projects, and we want the house to be easy to dispose of after we die, if we happen to live here that long. And what if we just can't keep it up and need to move? We want to have already done the work to make it easy to sell.
Is there nothing that Dawn can't do? Many ducks, geese and other wildlife have survived oil spills because of that product.
"The Repair Shop" TV show is another place where you can find hints for repairing/restoring items - although few Americans have to repair bomb damage from the Blitz as they sometimes do. One painting restorer on the show uses spit to clean old canvasses.
I love this post, and still miss hints from Héloïse. I’m going to try the headstone cleaner on my backyard wall, white brick but looks like that 100 year old head stone.
Cleaned my wife’s family’s gravestones. Small town where no family lives anymore. Expensive to have done with no water faucet nearby. Appreciated the service and happy that the gravestones look good again.
“The ones that love us best, are the ones we’ll lay to rest, and visit their graves on holidays at best,
The ones that love us least are the ones we’ll die to please
If it’s any consolation I don’t begin to understand”
The Replacements, “Bastards of Young”
But that might not happen and the work is also for us. It's a way to focus on getting things done that you yourself will enjoy
I assumed it was as much satisfying project as anything. Doing stuff that brings you as sense of accomplishment.
We are finishing our basement. Taken 2 winters now, still not done. I might hire a guy to clean the project up. I'm getting bored with it.
First off, crock pots can be found for a few dollars at a thrift store. These can be used for any number of non-food jobs. But really, who doesn't have an old crock pot or three stored away somewhere gathering dust?
I did a survey of headstones/markers in my local cemetery in Seattle, as sort of a conservation/demographics project. Many of the older marble stones were almost unreadable. This is a problem all over, especially in old private or family cemeteries. Often, this is the only physical records of someone's life, a few simple lines on a stone at their gravesite.
I didn't do any cleaning; technically, the stones and the ground are private property. But I did record as many as I could for posterity. Some needed to be thoroughly cleaned (note: do NOT use a pressure washer on marble) to be legible, others would have to be digitally photographed from several angles and processed to get the writing and graphics visible.
Kudos to people who do this work.
P.S. I discovered a pronounced rise in deaths of people 20-40 at 1918-19, the flu pandemic.
I paid to have the family plot marker in Forest Hill cleaned a while ago (a lot of lichen). The lichen has returned. I'm not gonna clean it again.
Aggie said...
Dawn was the surfactant of choice to clean up the hydrocarbon mess left from the Deepwater Horizon blowout.
===========
was it even necessary to do that? except for eco-performance of course.
why not fund "gain-of-function research" on sea biota to perform this task?
of healing GAIA miseries
Caroline said...
I love this post…
Yes me too.
Headstones remind me of an old LBJ story, still relevant in cases of questionable elections. Two Democratic Party workers in Texas (LBJ's stomping ground) are working through a cemetery, copying names to add to the voters' list. Often it is difficult to read the names, and this requires some scraping. Finally they get to a grave that seems hopeless. They take turns scraping, but it doesn't work. The name is still unreadable. One says: well, let's just move on. There are plenty of graves here. The other says: No goddamit, this person has as much right to vote as anyone in this cemetery.
What happened to the Confederate POW headstones in Madison? Were they cleaned up or cleaned out?
I found a 19th century Webb family plot an elderly cousin had told me about in the woods by a farmer's grain bins. The barely legible headstones and short iron fence were all akimbo, but the creepy part was the sunken ground in front of each stone. Telescope Webb was born on the pre-Revolutionary Tally Ho plantation the plot once served. No one is left who knew anything about the ancestral house(s), but there is a Tally Ho Road in Stem, NC, which is more an area than a town.
I ended up sealing about half of my 22 80-100 y.o. windows 20 years ago. Screwed the sashes together so I didn't have to worry about the hardware and caulked the edges. I did replace most of the sash cords and weights, so some idiot could re-open them later. Unfortunately, the cord had some polyester, which disintegrated in the sun, so the cord is thinner now.
>>Is there nothing that Dawn can't do?
It seems to be a miracle liquid. Hopefully not destroying Gaea along the way. When I can work up the energy (rarely), the combo of lots of Dawn, lots of baking soda, and boiling water is great for getting body/hair oils out of pillowcases and sheets.
--gpm
Ralph L., I lived in an old house with old-school double-hung windows that were about 5 feet tall. Painted shut for years. I pried off the moulding, pulled the window frames out, scraped a ton of paint off of them and sanded it down some, pried open the sash weight cutouts, pulled the weights out, took out the pulleys and cleaned them up, and then re-installed everything back together with new sash cords and some weatherstripping. They worked great and it was very satisfying. I even built some screens for them for summer use. There were already storm frames for winter; they'd been painted on as well.
I removed all the paint and 95% of the brick-like putty from mine (broke ~1/4 of the wavy old glass on the old points), cleaned the glass with wet Brillos, painted the sanded bare wood with diluted boiled linseed oil before priming and reglazing (paid someone to do that, and the putty wouldn't harden for months). I couldn't find weatherstripping that I thought would work, which led me to seal half that I wasn't going to open anyway. Each room has at least one working window, and the bedrooms, two. I was so much younger then.
Carbide-bladed scrapers are the best, but they chip easily on nails. I probably put on a couple pounds of lead from scraping siding, trim, and interior woodwork to bare wood. The exterior has held up well, but I keep my house very humid in winter, so condensation and sun took off paint at the bottom of the glass behind shades. You have to remove interior facing to get to the weights and cords, which is a bother when the cord jumps off the pulley and snags. I finally learned to raise my windows slowly.
Add Dawn to Goo Be Gone. Leave it outside covered so stray cats don't sample.
Trust me. This is what I do. Actually, I also do lobbying, but my advice there is identical.
Including the cats. And the best product for creating authentic original looking hardware is hammered metal Rustoleum. Do not underestimate hammered Rustoleum.
Add Dawn to Goo Be Gone. Leave it outside covered so stray cats don't sample.
Trust me. This is what I do. Actually, I also do lobbying, but my advice there is identical.
Including the cats. And the best product for creating authentic original looking hardware is hammered metal Rustoleum. Do not underestimate hammered Rustoleum.
Also, go buy some new shit. It will be better for the environment and a fraction of the cost.
You must have a ReStore in Madison also. Best place to buy upscale old fixtures, much as I hate Jimmy Carter.
Do not underestimate hammered Rustoleum.
Just keep it off the roads. Highway deaths are already way up since St. George died.
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