Here are some pics showing what I'm doing:
As beautiful as the house looks from the street, when you get up on a ladder some of the windows look like this, w/ god-knows-how-many years of bad paint on them. (House is ~80 years old).
So basically the only way to do it right is to burn off the old stuff and start fresh:
The wood underneath on this one is near mint old growth redwood and pine(?), no termite parties or hack painters w/ dull scrapers have ever visited:
