As I mentioned in a previous post, I found a fantastic, antique mantle for the living room fireplace. But it had so many layers of paint on it, the details of the carving had lost their clarity. So I wanted to remove the paint and clean it up.
This had to be done in my basement, since it's the middle of winter. So a safe paint stripper was essential. I had a bottle of the orange citrus stripper and started to use that. But I had seen a non toxic stripper, called Paint & Urethane Stripper by Blue Bear, at the Historic Home Show and wanted to give that a try too. That made me decide to do a side by side comparison!
Here's what I learned:
Both strippers take awhile to work - at least a few hours. I found the best approach was to apply a heavy coat in the evening, cover it with plastic, and scrape it down the next morning. That gave it lots of time to penetrate the many layers of paint.
The orange, citrus stripper got down to bare wood in 2 applications. But it's messy!!! I read one review that described the scraped off paint as boogers.....and that's the perfect description. It comes off easily with a putty knife, but you can't get it off the knife, no matter how much you shake it. You need to manually scrape it off. And the pile of sticky boogers on the work table wasn't a lot of fun. And to finish cleaning everything off, they recommend odorless mineral spirits - which I really didn't want to use in my closed up basement.
The Paint & Urethane Stripper took 3 applications to get to bare wood. But it was much easier to work with. The old paint was easy to remove and you could clean up any extra with soap and water. A huge improvement! And look at some of the details, that were completely lost with the multiple layers of paint! |
| Top latex layers wrinkled up quickly! |
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| Look at the detail |
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| You couldn't even see some of those scrolls and dots before I started! |
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| It's a messy project! |
The result? Well, I wasn't trying to strip this to the point that I can just stain the wood. I just wanted to see the beautiful carved details in the original. And I couldn't be more pleased. Isn't this a beauty? I can't wait to get it installed!
So what would I use next time? Well I still prefer these environmentally friendly products. They are a huge improvement over the nasty chemical ones. And while the Paint & Urethane Stripper took an extra coating to get me to the bare wood, I still think I'd use that again. The ease of use with water clean up and less sticky mess, made it a great way to get this dirty job done!
