We picked up the dresser probably six months ago from Construction Junction. It took a little coercing because it screams ladies and was dirt-butter-yellow, but I’m a sucker for tiny castors, it was $35, and we happened to have a van that day. So it sat in the basement until now. We planned on repainting it a less offensive butter yellow, but as I was Goo-Gone-ing off the price tags most of the paint came with them. We had a Premium Stripper in the basement and decided to see what she could do.

I haven’t stripped much before. Maybe even never, so I don’t have much to compare this to, that said, it seemed to work well. I think about two coats of stripper and almost all of the paint was gone. You spray it on, it bubbles up and makes your well ventilated room smell like lifespan-reducing chemicals, and then you wipe and scrape it off. The paint comes off as goopy blobs that get all over everything, so have a few rolls of paper towels handy. We used lots of small picks to get around the carvings, and putty knives for the flat parts. Gloves were key too.

Five minutes into scraping: “Are your hands starting to burn a bit?”

“Nope”

“Hm, I thought mine were, maybe my imagination”

a few minutes later: “Nope, they’re burning. A whole lot. I’m going to run to the nearest sink now and wash them off.”

Maggie followed shortly after and admitted that she just wanted me to look like a sissy.

I looked at the active chemicals in the stripper at the hardware store and cross referenced them with several pairs of gloves. Big thick pair- fair resistance, Thick yellow pair – fair, expensive crazy pair- fair. Turns out, the only one with top rated resistance was a flimsy pair of nitrile gloves. I decided to trust the labels and went against my gut feeling and bought them.

We threw the thin gloves away. I had one pair of thick blue ones that we took turns wearing. They lasted a lot longer, but gave in to burning after about 20-30 minutes. One vaguely painful and handwashing filled evening later we had a sorta hazy, but mostly paint free dresser. I cleaned the haze and small bits of paint off with Formby’s Refinisher, which, after the stripper, was a joy to work with. It cleaned up nicely with some teak oil and wax.

I’m not going to say that this was fun or really all that quick. But what I will say is that after 40 bucks and a few chemical burns, we have a pretty great walnut veneer dresser that has almost all of the handles.