Given all the "Fixer Upper" shows on US television right now, and the fact that 'beams' are in, I decided (with some pushing from my wife) to sand a spot on one of the beams in our home and see what the wood looked like. Below is the end result, after 8 hours of sanding.
The beams are all 1 solid piece of wood. Unreal. And someone painted them a dull gray color!
I did a quick sanding of the beams to cut down to the wood on all the high spots, and bring out the wood grain so that when we stain them a nicer brown color, it'll look really nice.
So now the question I pose to anyone that reads this is, do I keep sanding until all the paint is gone? Is it worth 3 more days of work?
My hand still ache from all the sanding I did Sunday and Monday. Please take that into consideration = )