The week I ruined a $40 dresser with paint stripper

Last spring I got a solid oak dresser off Facebook Marketplace for 40 bucks. I was dead set on stripping it down to bare wood and staining it dark walnut. Three days of scraping and using that smelly chemical stripper I ended up with a blotchy, stained mess that looked worse than when I started. My buddy Dave stopped by and said why not just sand the top smooth and paint the rest with chalk paint. I fought him on it for an hour because I wanted that natural wood look so bad. Finally I gave in, spent $15 on a quart of leftover sage green from another project, and it came out better than any stain job I ever did. Anybody else have a project that just refused to go the way you planned?

2 comments

2 Comments

paulperry5d ago

Three days of scraping" - did you ever get that smell out of the house?

nathan_webb5d ago

Yeah, I actually read somewhere that baking soda and vinegar are supposed to neutralize those kinds of smells, but when I tried it after a similar project it barely helped. The real trick I heard about is using an ozone generator, but you gotta be super careful with those because they can mess up your lungs if you're in the room. My buddy swears by just leaving bowls of activated charcoal around for a few weeks. Honestly, some smells just bake into the wood or drywall and never really come out all the way.