The Stripping Post

     I promised a post on my stripping adventure, so here it is. We have been working on our dinning room umm well since we moved in over a year ago.  We have fixed the cracks in the wall and gotten rid of the texture, and now we are wanting to paint.  Well I can't just paint over the door from the dinning room to the kitchen. It has so many cracks and places where old paint has chipped off then the next person just painted over it--yuck.

Step 1: take off the hardware

     So the first thing I did was take off the hardware and get all my supplies together.

Pretty picture.  I also covered the floor

     I started with the Citristrip, gloves (instructions say these are NOT the kind you should use, but I had them so they are what I used), tray, paint brush, and plastic scraper (instructions said plastic). What I later used: brown paper bag on the floor (then realized I didn't cover enough floor and then next day I used a garbage bag cut open), metal scraper (I had to make sure not to gouge the wood but otherwise it worked much better).

I covered part of the floor. Step 2: cover the paint area in stripper

     I have stripped paint two times before this with the stripper in the can, but had read a positive review of Citristrip, so I decided to get it a try.  Man this stuff was weird.  It is a gel, and can be difficult to spread on the paint.  If you plan on doing something like this you should probably take the door off and lay it horizontally, so the stripper isn't just curling up and falling on the floor.  The Citristrip doesn't smell near as bad as the other strippers, but it wasn't able to get all the paint on this door (at some time I thought the door was made out of paint).

Step3: Wait for it to look like this.

      The chemical stripper will peel the paint right off.  You need to let it sit long enough for it to do its job, but if you let it dry it stops working and is harder to scrap off.  I looked up some tips online and saw that some people recommended spraying it with distilled alcohol and since I didn't have any distilled alcohol, so with my indentured servant's approval I used rubbing alcohol. Well I don't know if distilled alcohol works, but rubbing alcohol really doesn't. I actually think it may have dried it quicker. 

Step 4: Scrape the paint off

     So once you see the paint curl up, test a section and if the paint is coming off keep scraping it off. It is best if you can get your indentured servant to do this.  You may also be able to trick get your husband to help by telling him how much fun it is. I will not lie, this is hard work, and I think we should have done it in two parts.  

Step 5: Keep scraping

     If you have an old house like ours (built in 1938) then don't believe that this stuff will actually strip all the layers of paint.

Step 6: Clean up the mess

     So our old house with 17,098 layers of paint, made a large mess.

Oops

     I didn't cover up our nice wood floors in the dinning room and the paint fell on it.  Because of the stripper and the old enamel oil paint it is not coming up. We refinished all of the hardwood floors in our house before we moved in, so I am not freaking out. It just means you will get a post about how to refinish hardwood floors later on.
     Here it is over a week later. I got up thinking that I would just sand what was left (maybe an hour) then prime, and paint it.  Well all the sander did was heat up the old enamel oil paint (covering the sand paper) and spread it on the door while sealing the blob of paint to a different spot. I was not happy with this so what was supposed to take an hour turned into another chemical stripping adventure. After stripping again, I decided it was good enough to prime, then paint.  It still needs another coat or two of paint, but here is what it looks like now.