Tag: staining furniture

We have lived beside our neighbors for 15 years. Right next door. If you walk out their front door and look to your left, you see our garage. Our garage that is almost always full of furniture and almost never has room for a car. And since we are always home, the garage door is always open. Open for the world to see our messy, messy garage. And yet the mess inside is constantly changing. I’m forever moving the dresser in the front to get to the table in the back and moving the lawn equipment out to get to my stack of boxes, and so on. I have been doing this for 8 of the 15 years we have lived here. So when I received a text from my neighbor asking me if she knew of someone that could help her with an old cabinet, my first thought was hmmm….maybe our garage isn’t as obviously telling as I thought. My second thought was, I do know someone! Me! She explained that she had an old cabinet that was her mothers and remembers it being in her own bedroom at some point. She had started stripping the old green paint off but had gotten to a point where she felt like she was in too deep. Not knowing what I was getting into, I walked over to see the condition of the cabinet. It didn’t look too bad. She had done most of the stripping and just a little paint was left on the doors and the drawer front. Certainly salvageable. I enlisted my hubby to help carry it down the hill to our basement and immediately got to work. I used Back to Nature Multi Strip to finish taking off the paint that was left. This stuff is magic. The container says it takes off 15 layers of paint (naturally) in 30 minutes and boy was it right. I’m not getting paid to say that either. (I can’t figure out how to get companies to sponsor my blogs, but that’s another story.) You’re welcome Sunnyside Corporation. Anyway, I left the stripper on for an hour and it ALL scraped right off. Just look at that paint lift right up! Like pulling up a big chunk of skin when you’re peeling from a sunburn. So satisfying! I let it dry overnight and then got right into sanding it down with my handy dandy orbital palm sander. I did have to use my Dremel on some of the curved and corner pieces, but eventually all the green was gone. She picked Early American Wood Stain by Varathane and once it was down to the bare wood, I started in on the stain. I used a chip brush to get the color on, waited a few minutes and then rubbed it in with a clean cloth. Most of it only needed one coat. I had to lightly sand down the doors a couple times to get the color even, and it still wasn’t perfect, but now I’m sure it was the wood and not just me. I installed some glass knobs that I had laying around, just so that I could see the finished piece. TADA! She loved the glass knobs and wanted to keep them, so I put a layer of Minwax Paste Finishing Wax on the top for extra protection and it was done! Needless to say, she seemed very excited and happy that I could help her out and has already found a place for it. I absolutely love what she’s done with it, but I am totally admiring that little ceramic fruit tree right now! 😉

This is the first piece of furniture that I have stripped that I actually enjoyed. I look forward to using Back to Nature Multi Strip again and maybe I can get them to sponsor me for the next job! Feel free to send me some tips on getting sponsors! 😜