Stripping paint

I have been doing a lot of decorating in the house recently and one thing that has been something of a bugbear is the paint that is flaking off  most of the internal doors. They can be painted over but this looks rather half-arsed and the only real solution is to strip off the existing paint and start again. The problem is that there is an awful lot of this paint – 120 years’ worth, in fact.

Flaky old paint

The front door was a case in point. I didn’t fancy sanding all the way down so I tried a bottle of paint stripper. This came in an awkward to open can and consisted of a gel that smelled suspiciously like nail varnish remover.

Bubbling up with stripper

After half an hour the paint had bubbled up quite nicely so I scraped it off to reveal – more paint. I gave it another go and did start to get down to the original layer of wood varnish in places but by this point I had run out of paint stripper.

Two lots of stripper.

In the end I removed the rest of the paint with a heat gun and then sanded down the bare wood which was a rather laborious task.

Stripped, sanded and varnished

I have a suspicion that the best way to do this is to remove the vast bulk of the paint with the heat gun and then clear the last of the paint and varnish with the paint stripper but at around £10 a bottle the paint stripper isn’t exactly the cheapest substance in the world. Maybe I should go back to making homebrew – I seem to recall that stuff could strip down the dining room table in seconds.