Floor Enigma

I’m work­ing on refin­ish­ing the floor in what will be my mas­ter bed­room once the floor is refin­ished. And oth­er sundry stuff tak­en care of as well. Any­way, the refin­ish­ing was going fine until I hit this strange spot where the strip­per refus­es to work. It won’t soft­en the paint or any­thing. I put up a ques­tion on Ask MetaFil­ter and while peo­ple are giv­ing me oth­er advice, no one real­ly has a clue why this could be hap­pen­ing. The pho­tos above illus­trate what I’m talk­ing about. The unstrip­pable area seems to be smack dab in the cen­ter of the room. Con­found­ing. Looks like I’m going to have to use elbow grease to get rid of that paint. That’s cer­tain­ly a mess wait­ing to hap­pen.

[Update] It appears that the sec­tion that would not strip is paint over untreat­ed wood. Thus, the strip­per was soak­ing through the paint and lift­ing up the var­nish on the easy to strip por­tions. Since the paint was on top of this it came right up. On the unvar­nished por­tion the strip­per must have just soaked right into the wood. My guess is that there was a rug on the floor in the cen­ter of the room orig­i­nal­ly and they just chose to var­nish the exposed wood. Hal­fass­es.