Remind Me Never To Do This Type of Furniture Makeover Again!
You know me, I enjoy making over just about anything, especially furniture to fit my decorating vision when decorating a room in my home.
I also like giving furniture new purposes. I have many pieces where I changed the finish with decorative paint techniques and trim. And when needed, I have created new uses or functions for the pieces of furniture to use in different rooms.
50% of the furniture I own are hand-me-downs. AKA… free.
If I like the shape and size of a piece I know I can add my own style to it to fit my needs. 16 years ago I did just this using two identical base cabinets to create the base of my studioffice work table.
I painted the cabinets, added a top and baseboard trim along the bottom to create a worktable.
When we moved, the worktable became part of my new studioffice. The worktable has served me well, until I no longer needed it when we changed the room recently to a multi-purpose room.
After making that room change, I decided to move one of the cabinets to the guest room. The one where the tree from the yard came crashing through during hurricane Helene. The cabinet will now become a dresser of sorts to hold a table lamp and a place for guests to put their things.
I thought the cabinet would look nice in the room to coordinate with it’s top. See the glass fronted cabinet along the wall in the photo above? It was made to go on top of the cabinet.
I stripped the finish years ago and added feet to it to make it a standalone piece of furniture. I haven’t used the two pieces together or in the same room in 30 years.
This past week I started to strip the paint off the base so it would have the same finish as the top. I thought it would take a day or two and I would have the makeover done and posted earlier this week. That didn’t happen.
I have never been a fan of stripping the finish off of furniture, but do like the natural wood look that can be had when you take the time and effort to do it.
Well… I WILL NEVER ATTEMPT TO STRIP another piece of furniture… EVER!!!
Stripping a painted or stained piece of furniture is the messiest, smelliest and most toxic furniture makeover to take on… even when using a non-toxic stripper like Citrastrip. Plus, you never know how the wood is going to look underneath once stripped.
When I stripped the glass cabinet top to use in my kitchen in my previous home, the finish came out amazing. You can see it in the above photo where it is sitting on another sideboard, a larger one that was also a hand-me-down piece of furniture that became a bathroom sink vanity in my current home.
I thought if I stripped the base cabinet it would look just like the top that is now in the guest room since the pieces were made to go together to create a narrow style china cabinet.
The stripping process was a TOTAL FAIL!!!!
I put stripper on, let it stand following the directions on the label and removed it 3 times. It was a lengthy process and still there are just too many dark spots where the stained finish won’t budge.
I have use Mineral Spirits an sanded and still the finish doesn’t look the way I wanted. Sanding the surface just made the lighter areas, lighter and didn’t remove the dark areas at all.
Only the drawer front came out the way I envisioned.
And… to make matters worse, I had forgotten that I added the baseboard trim around the bottom of the cabinet when I first made the cabinets part of the worktable years ago. UGH!!!!
The white baseboard molding is not even wood, but painted MDF board that even when stripped is still white and won’t be the same as the rest of the cabinet. I felt pretty darn dumb when I didn’t realize this before I started the stripping process. If I had remembered I never would have started this project.
The baseboard molding was attached using lots of Liquid Nails. It would be very hard to remove it without damaging the cabinet.
On a positive note, all is not lost. Paint and some creativity will fix it. :-)
A painful lesson learned. Now at least I know that stripping the finish from furniture is something I will never ever do again. It was messy, time consuming, toxic and didn’t turn out as I expected. I should have left well enough alone.
Over the weekend I plan to clean the surface and paint the cabinet again using one of the many decorative painting techniques like I did on my garage door you can find in my Furniture Makeovers section.
I may end up leaving the drawer natural so it will coordinate with the cabinet top in the room.
I will share the finished cabinet makeover with you next week.
Have you ever stripped furniture or had a project not turn out the way you wanted? If so, how did you fix it?
