I’ve been hoarding this information for a while now. But I finally got around to stripping wood doors for the kitchen! They’re not complete, but here is our part one.
First things first, the video.
Weee ok bye!
No? Ok fine. A little more information.
The basic trouble with this kitchen – actually the entire house – is that most of the previous renovations gave no thought whatsoever to structural support.
This load bearing wall had a double window and double door with no header supports. At all. It’s a miracle the whole thing didn’t come crashing down! (You can see more from this kitchen before post!)
Naturally we had to pull all this out, shore it up, and add back the missing structural support. I quite honestly handed Brandon tools for this part so you’ll have to watch the video and imagine his voodoo. 😀
The Door Hunt
In the meantime, I found these positively magical salvage doors on eBay. I actually found them…maybe two years ago? I’m not even kidding.
I would pull them up every few weeks to just stare at them (and other things by this seller). I even made a valiant case for buying them for the front hall (roundly dismissed on all counts).
But still I COVETED THEM. They must be mine. (And honestly for $350 it felt like theft. Just buy them already, Paige.)
Eventually I figured out I could use them in the kitchen. Is this historically accurate? Absolutely not (more on that later). But I mean…did you see them? Who could resist?
I planned to strip them down to bare wood and then refinish them (lol. spoiler: that didn’t end well). Previously I’ve had great success with Jasco.
It is caustic as all get out and will burn the crap out of you, but I tell you it WORKS. I’ve gone through 5 layers of paint in 30 minutes with that stuff.
It stinks to absolute high heaven so you have to do it outside. Also like I said it will burn you after about 0.2 seconds of contact. So with two doors and four sides, I really wanted to keep the burning to a minimum.
Stripping the Doors
I decided to try out this product called Smart Strip. It’s theoretically just as powerful but doesn’t give off nearly so many fumes. So you can use it indoors. Yay! Yippee!
It has roughly the consistency of lotion. I found it easiest to apply with a brush, then cover and wait 12-24 hours. I happened to have some of this specialty paper lying around but trash bags or wax paper would likely work too.
After 24 hours, I pulled up the paper and began to scrape off the paint. Try to scrape off the paint.
It went….ok. Not the best, not the worst. It took me a good long time to strip it down to just this point.
I used mainly a paint scraper and dental picks to get the softened paint out. This process took…literally hours. Hours upon hours of scraping and picking and scraping some more.
And while I had hours to think while performing this arduous task, I came to a conculsion.
When stripping paint off doors, you can’t win. Ever. It’s always going to take a lot of time or a lot of energy or a lot of money. You just get to pick which one you want.
More coming soon. Because honestly after I got 90% of the paint off, I left these doors alone for a few months. My willpower needed to recover.
But oh boy, recover it did. Stay tuned for Part 2!
