See How To Refinish A Dresser – Part 1 – Assessing the Project

My first real action step in refinishing my wife’s 80 year old dresser was removing the numerous layers of paint that had been applied in the past.

At first I was afraid a commercial paint solvent would hurt the wood, but scraping and scratching with a wire brush got me pretty much nowhere. I ended up hitting my local mega hardware store and scouting out the different types of paint removal chemicals available.

There are lots of options these days, but you generally want to make sure that the product you used is approved for the proper surface. There are solvents designed to remove paint from metal, wood and even plastic. There are environmentally friendly options and there are chemicals which are covered with toxic warnings. There are even different consistencies from liquids to gels and everything in between. What you choose for your project really depends on your requirements.

I settled on a fairly toxic looking paint removal gel and picked up a cheap spray bottle with it. It was designed specifically for wood surfaces and the spray gel seemed like a pretty easy way to go because it was designed to adhere to a surface and bubble the paint up after about 15 minutes of standing time. I think it was either this Klean-Strip Liquid Paint Stripper or some variation of it.

One word of caution: when using any sort of chemical paint solvent, be sure to provide plenty of ventilation and believe the warnings about wearing hand and eye protection. I was sloppy and had a few drops of this solvent land on my arm. I wiped it off a second later and thought I was okay but within a minute it felt as though someone was ramming a lit cigarette on the spot. I had to go inside and flush my arm with cold water before the sting went away. After that I was really careful.

Removing the Paint

I started on the drawers of the dresser and eventually moved on to the body. It was a remarkably tedious process. For each drawer and surface of the dresser I had to:

Using the gel paint stripper is a messy job.

1. Spray a heavy layer of paint remover on the drawer and let it sit for at least 20 minutes. If the paint remover is one of these new super chemical concoctions chances are a good bit of the paint will begin to bubble up fairly quickly like some sort of science experiment gone wrong.

2. Use a plastic scraper (a metal scraper would risk scratching the wood) and scrape away oodles of gooey paint. I strongly recommend using some sort of disposable drop-cloth or floor covering for this. It’s a very messy process. I wore old work clothes placed each dresser piece on used cardboard boxes that I had broken open and flattened. I used a piece of cardboard under each drawer.

3. After an initial scraping I would repeat the process, spraying the gel paint remover again on all the places that didn’t come clean the first time. After another 20 minutes I’d scrap again.

4. Often I found myself spraying and waiting and scraping four or five times for certain areas but the spray gel tended to splatter and land in ways I wasn’t expecting. I finally got smart and started spraying some gel on the rough areas and then using some cheap small kids’ paintbrushes to kind of smear the gel around on the paint that wasn’t coming up easily. Again, I’d wait for the remover to soak in before even trying to scrape.

Time to break out the wire brush and steel wool to remove this decades old paint.

5. Finally I used a soft metal brush to apply gel in the really hard to get corners and crevices, waited the required 20 minutes, and then scrubbed most of the paint specs out.

6. Even after all this scrubbing and scraping with the paint remover I’d still have some areas that were tainted with color. It turns out that under the white paint this dresser had at least one or two layers of red paint. I was able to scrub out most of the color by using “00″ grade steel wool and a little bit of paint removal gel. I scrubbed the area like I was scrubbing dried spaghetti sauce off a ceremic plate in the kitchen sink.

This was really one of the longest processes. It would generally take me about three hours of work to clean 98% of the paint coloring off just one drawer. To keep myself from inhaling too many fumes and burning out on the project I tried to only work on the dresser once every couple days.