With the plan to put in a new patio door, it made sense to tackle the transom and molding around it. One of the features that sold us on the house is the amount of original woodwork intact – moldings, rosettes, stairs, banister, wood paneling, transoms. All covered by layers, and I mean layers, of paint.

I don’t have a very good before shot of the transom, I was so anxious to get to it. Here’s a corner that gives a sense of paint layers.

So I went to my trusty Peel Away 7 and layered it on like cake batter, covered it by wax paper:

waited for 24 hours, peeled off the paper and discovered this:

above is from my scraping. then sergey came with reinforcement as my hand was getting pretty sore. he also removed the left molding because it was obviously a replacement and was just stuck in place with edge sticking out past the rosette pretty atrociously. we also assumed that the old molding was behind the new one, cause that happened before. alas, nothing but brick, and some holes to the outside.

clearly not anywhere close to clean, clear and smooth. so out came the peel away and transom and molding got covered up again:

somehow the second layer of peel away did not leave me reassured that I would get the result I am looking for