Bringing pieces home

Well I decided since there is allot of work to do and doing all of it in Wisconsin is not feasible I should take work home with me to do in my "spare" time. I started with taking off the kitchen cabinet doors, the drawers in the kitchen and the cabinets in the hall next to the fridge. There are at least two layers of paint on these cabinets with a layer of shellac and a blond wood finish under that.

The smell of these doors is awful, yes I know I keep mentioning the smell but you must understand if this was a smellovision computer you would turn it off and never come back here!

I also took home the dangling light fixture that was hanging from the wall by the wiring. The mouse poop on it had to come off but unfortunately it also took off the brass type finish. What do you think? Should I keep it this way?

So I decided to strip some of the cabinets. I used the spray type cans of stripper from Menards and tried a can from Walmart. Both worked ok but the over spray was brutal. So I decided after the two cans ran out, on just four doors, to go with a large can of paste type stripper from Menards. The paste was the 5 layer at a time stuff that was the strongest available. It seemed to do a good job, at least better then the spray cans did, taking off the paint and shellac. This stripping left some of the blond wood stuff still on the doors. I'm not a fan of blond wood at all so it had to go. I used a 50-50 mix of lacquer thinner and denatured alcohol solvent and a fine steel wool pad to scrub it off. You must go with the grain and NEVER against it or it will leave marks! (Experience speaking here)

I decided the wood would be too light if I did not find a stain so I decided to check out HD and see what they had. Well they don't sell samples so from the little pieces of wood on display I tried to pick out a stain. I took home a small can of $4.99 stain and it looked like crap. I went back and bought a darker shad and it too looked like crap. So I headed over to Menards and found they actually had mini samples for .25! Wow! I grabbed handfuls of colors that I thought might work and decided for a quarter I couldn't go wrong.



My sample board...the one I chose was the traditional pecan which is on the far right.


I also decided to go with a high gloss finish of Hellsman Spar urethane.





After stripping a coat of stain and a coat of poly...














After two coats of poly, cleaned up original knobs and new hinges...