Restoring Old Homes: How to Screen a Porch and Strip Hardware

We have been slowly restoring our home.  One of the projects that has been on the back burner for several years is our back porch.  When we purchased the home, the back porch screens had been vandalized.  They were also made of chrome frames.  We quickly discarded them and never got around to putting in their replacements.

Finally, I had a couple weekends to work on the back porch.  To put the screens back in place, I purchased a roll of tight mesh black screen at Home Depot.  I used my staple gun to stick the screen to the existing wood frames with 1/4 inch staples being sufficient for the job.

Obviously staples are not pretty to look at.  I searched for some trim strips and came up with some hemlock 1.5 inch pieces that seemed to work well.  After two coats of paint, they were ready for installation.

I got the hemlock strips up with 4d nails on the frames and 3d finish nails for the door.  After that, I pulled the original copper hardware out of storage and gave it a bath in Goof Off.  That helped soften up the coats of paint that cloaked the metal finish.  A rag and some very fine steel wool did the trick of removing most of the paint.

NOTE: Rubber gloves break down with Goof Off so I just used some sandwich bags to keep it off my skin.  If you leave it on your skin too long your skin turns into a giant callous.  Believe, me. I know.    

After about fifteen minutes of buffing the paint off, the pieces were ready for installation.

The finished product is quite rewarding.