Much Ado About Nothing – “Stripping”
I came home the other day with a stripper. What the heck, the kids are out of the house now, I’ve got more time to be creative, so why not do something out of my box and a little crazy? Admittedly, I have never purchased a stripper or really understood what goes into stripping, but, on a whim, I just took it upon myself to try something new. You can imagine the reaction I got at home! Of course, when I say stripper, I’m not talking about a sexy dress and a hot night. I mean an ugly dresser and a hot garage. You knew that, right?
The day before, I’d rescued a dresser from an abusive household. Five solid wood drawers covered in six colors of bad paint. Half the knobs were missing; drawers had water damage; and no one was offering up an explanation about the scratches that looked like they could only have been caused by a rogue power tool. I understand it’s a hard world out there and bad things happen to good furniture, but this was a sad thing to see. So I brought it home and started stripping.
Then I started grumbling which soon turned to mid-level snarling and finally became some impressive cussing. You see, furniture stripper turns paint into a snot-like glue with underlying demonic properties. I started believing that nothing short of a papal exorcism was going to get that paint glob to give up its possession of that dresser. Lots of chemicals that can kill you if ingested, lots of scraping, lots of wiping down, more chemicals, more scraping, then sanding until the wood was so close to its original state that I thought it’d sprout leaves.
After several weekends of intense rehabilitation, several coats of stain and varnish, a set of matched drawer pulls and more money than I would have spent on an entire suite of new bedroom furniture, what had once been rejected as kindling for a trash fire was now a proud and lovely addition to the house, a beautiful work of craftsmanship that can be treasured for generations. (Or better be after what I went through to clean it up.)
Next time, though, I’ll think twice before I drop my drawers on the garage floor and save another dresser. Some things should just be left to the professionals!
