Paint Removal For Household Woodwork And Doors

Repainting the interior surfaces of a home is one of the basic jobs in any effort to update or refresh. Particularly on doors, woodwork and cabinetry, after a number of coats of paint, those wood surfaces need to have the old paint removed before more is applied. For any items with layers of paint applied before approximately 1978, the presence of lead in the paint adds safety and disposal concerns. Although our focus is furniture, since we have a stripping system which handles not only wood finishes but paint, we offer a complete paint removal service for any architectural items that can be brought to us. We have removed old paint from doors, mantles, columns, crown molding, shutters, filigree, stair rails, cabinets, balusters, louvers, windows, baseboard, steps, vent covers and more. Lest we mislead, we do not promise to remove 100% of the paint. In nearly every case we do remove better than 99%, but there may be a little left in corners or recesses.

Paint removal is much more difficult and time consuming than stripping old wood finishes and is consequently more expensive. Although paint removal is more expensive than removing wood finishes, it is nevertheless well worth the extra expense and in some regards is economical. After spending many long hours using large quantities of stripping supplies with very unsatisfactory results and a mess of hazardous waste to deal with, many people have brought items to us to finish up. After seeing how clean items get with our process and how quickly they are completed, they have commented that our service was enormously time saving and not that much more expensive than the true cost of doing it themselves.

Each of the doors below had a top layer of white paint and other colors underneath. We think you will agree that our stripping process does a good job of removing paint. As we already noted, we don't promise that 100% of the paint will be gone, but we get pretty close. Please scroll down below the doors to see some additional comments we have about these doors.

It is always interesting to find out what is hiding under the paint. What a variety of woods under the paint in this group. It should make one wonder if it would be worth using a wood finish instead of repainting!

Stripper doesn't remove plaster, so the patches in the solid redwood door are still intact and the plaster around the mail slot in the door second from right is still present.

The two doors on the right offer an answer to questions we are often asked. Will stripping hurt glass? Will it hurt leaded glass? In both cases we think you can plainly see that the answer is, no. Some glazing materials are softened by the stripping chemicals, but the glass is never effected. It will only need to be cleaned. The unusual circle pattern in the glass of one door is interesting, isn't it?

The orange color you see in the wood of the door to the right is from a dye used in the bottom coat of paint. The dye has penetrated the outer layer of wood and cannot be removed with stripping. Most of it can be sanded out.

This is about as large scale of an illustration as we can provide of a before and after for a painted door we have stripped.There is a clearly seen drainage line where some stripper, trapped in the pocket where the floating panel resides, slowly drained. You can also see where sap from the knots in the wood bled again. An acetone wipe would take care of these issues and then the door is ready to paint

The main point you should clearly see, is that the paint is gone. Well, almost. What is left is inconsequential. We would challenge any do-it yourselfer to get a door cleaner in the time it takes us to do this!

Not only is it safe to strip glass and colored glass, the etched pattern in the clear glass was also unaffected.