Week 19 – Stripping Paint<\/p>\n

I decided that we would keep the old doors — single panel, solid wood, hard to replace — which meant that we needed to have the paint stripped off. \u00a0My dad had called around, and *IF* you could find anyone who would do it, it was $100-150 per door and took two weeks or more.<\/p>\n

I’d done this before with the “classic” strippers that all contain methylene chloride. \u00a0They stink, and it’s hard to get through more than one layer of paint at a time. \u00a0Dad had seen an episode of “This Old House” a couple of years earlier where they compared a variety of strippers. \u00a0The one that stood out was Peel Away. \u00a0I searched on the web for this then, and found an on-line supplier … in North Carolina. \u00a0We ordered a couple of gallons, and tried it on one of the doors. \u00a0It wasn’t bad, but it was the first time Stephen had stripped paint. \u00a0We sort of figured that we wouldn’t re-strip that door. \u00a0Best laid plans…<\/p>\n

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We had kept the doors flat, and covered, but water got under the covers anyways. \u00a0Half of the door on the left’s paint just came off when I took the cover off (these are the narrow closet doors). \u00a0It took three separate applications of a methylene chloride stripper on each side to get these doors to the point where I could sand the rest off. \u00a0That was about 4 hours per side, plus another 45 minutes sanding each side.<\/p>\n\n\t\t