Why living in a 100 year old house sometimes isn't that great

I usually love living in our old house, but sometimes it isn't that great. Nathan had the week between Christmas and New Year's off so I decided it was time we finish the remodeling of the upstairs bathroom we started last spring. Nathan was starting school on the 5th so I figured it was now or never. I started to rip the wallpaper down last spring and the walls underneath were a mess. We needed to replaster most spots were the wallpaper took off the wall and left big holes. That took 3 different mudding and sanding tries to get it right. Then the window casing was the next project. There was thick white glossy paint on it that was chipping in lots of places. We knew that there was lead paint at least one time on there, so comes our problem. If you research on the internet, lead paint is very bad and so is removing it. To sand it, you are not supposed to have kids in the house and are supposed to pay a professional lots of money which we don't have. That left us with chemical strippers. It took Nate 3 days and 3 different applications of stripper to get it off. See below for the intermediate phase.

See below for the final phase before we gave up and get ready to repaint it. We didn't leave the wood color because it wouldn't have matched the rest of the new trim in the room. It is beautiful wood though.



So we finally finished stripping it and are in the process of repainting it WHITE, the same color it was before we started!!! At least you can see the detail and we didn't have to sand the chipped spots and cause brain damaged children.

We still didn't finish the bathroom! It is primed and the trim painted. I will post finished pictures when we get it finished (in another year.) If anyone has a miracle stripper for lead paint, please let us know.