Restoration Surprises

I don’t believe I have ever started a restoration and had it go exactly as planned. Regardless of how well you inspect and prep the piece beforehand, you will undoubtedly find unexpected challenges along the way. Often they will present as a repair you didn’t notice when you first started. Sometimes, however, you get an especially interesting surprise.

When I first inspected this piece of furniture it appears to be a golden-colored stain over top of a wood species with wide grain. Originally we suspected pine. We cleaned the piece and then proceeded to apply the first coat of Citristrip gel (We usually buy it at Home Depot) to remove any clear coat and begin working on the stain. After sitting for 30 minutes I used a putty knife with zero pressure applied to test if we had let the gel to its work long enough. To my surprise, not only did the clear and topcoat come right off, but it revealed white paint underneath! That topcoat wasn’t stained at all!

What does this mean for the plan for this project? Well, two things should be considered before moving forward. The first is whether or not the customer is comfortable with the labor it will now take to get this back to 100% bare wood. Removing stain vs removing paint are two different animals and as it sits right now this will likely take twice the amount of time to complete. The second item to consider is whether or not they would like it to be painted and not stained at all. If we were to paint the piece we would could just do a single round of gel stripping and then some light sanding and prep for paint.

What Will We Do?

In our case, the customer chose the have the piece stained so we will be removing every last spec of paint. This will involve scotch pads, putty knives, and even dental tools. Not a spec of sandpaper will touch this wood until it is almost perfectly clean of paint and other material. Often people rush to start sanding which, while it does have its place, should be one of the last things you do when removing material in a restoration. Very quickly you can go from removing surface coatings to changing the shape of the wood itself. This is why we like to use a safe chemical agent and then slow and deliberate actions with our other tools first. Then we will proceed to careful sanding and performing some light repairs.

One interesting change in this project over most others is that the customer is leaving the choice of stain color up to us! I appreciate their confidence in our work and our style choices so in the coming days we will be doing some tests on scrap wood to get a sense of what might be the best option. There is some beautiful wood grain under all those years of paint. I can’t wait to see it come to life!