Renovating the Pines House

With the one hundred and fifty year celebration coming up at the end of the year, there is much work to be done on the house. The front verandah needs it most, so I have started removing several layers of paint. The layers must tell a story,pale green, dark green, cream, white and some gunge which could be a pink undercoat, but cannot be removed with paint remover. I'm using a heat gun, paint remover and a sander. I have tested for lead but it always indicates negative. I can't believe that no lead paint was used over the past one and a half centuries so think I should get another test kit.The heat gun leaves the house with fumes which I'm sure are 'toxic', and I could also burn it down, so instead I'm trying to rely mostly on paint remover even though it is more costly.

Now what I find interesting is that the house was built an 1857. The builders would have been over twenty five years old so they would have been born before the settlers started coming. Most settlers came from the United Kingdom where houses were built of brick so they wouldn't have had the knowledge of building in wood. The joinery in the house is excellent, showing considerable experience in building. As I see it, only the United States builds houses like they do here in New Zealand, discounting of course Queensland and I don't see any Queenslanders coming here to build in 1857. So where did the knowledge come from?