Why I Will Never Use Varnish Stripper Again

by Dan on 26 February 2009

My friend had the brilliant idea to buy an old, cheap wood table with chairs, and then strip, restain, and refinish them. I volunteered to help because it seemed like an interesting project. As a test my friend had already gone through the process with one of the table legs, and it looked pretty good. It should take no more than a couple of weeks to do, right?

But there were just a few problems.

1The Smell Is Horrible

This is particularly true for the methylene chloride-based strippers. I had originally chosen to use that variety because I assumed it worked better and just deal with the fact that methylene chloride is a "known carcinogen" (as the warnings on the can so subtly put it) and try to not to imagine cancer cells spontaneously forming inside my body.

After doing some of the work, I decided to also try Citristrip (a "less toxic" variety), and it did smell better than the methylene choloride variety. Although it has such a strong citrus scent, it still wasn't very pleasant at all.

2It Can Take Forever

No, I'm not exaggerating. The process went like this for me:

Slather on the goop, then wait fifteen minutes
Start scraping with the plastic scraper, then realize that the "flat" surface you're scraping isn't quite perfectly flat
Switch to the brush which works well until the bristles get covered in sludge
Try to clean off the sludge with a paper towel, then give up and just continue using the somewhat-less-effective brush
Wipe down the now-stripped area with mineral spirits to clean off any remaining sludge
Notice that I missed a few spots
Sob uncontrollably

It was particularly challenging because the table and chair legs had a significant amount of detailing which meant that I couldn't really use the scraper to work on a large area at once.

3It Can Be Very Messy

If you're not careful, it's very easy for this process to become overwhelmingly messy. For those people like me who don't always think things through, applying a chemical to an object to remove a finish produces a sludgy material as a byproduct. So by the end of one of my sessions, there would be stripper goop on everything, sludge on everything else, and I'd be surrounded by a pile of rags and paper towels.

But in my defense I did have enough sense to use a dropcloth!

So here we are, two years later, and the chairs and table are still not completely finished. If I had to do it all over again, I would seriously consider just painting them instead of refinishing.

That said, I'm sure that I did some things the "wrong" way. I'm willing to admit that part of the reason I had such a difficult time was because I wasn't familiar with the process, and didn't have a completely clear idea of what to do.

So if anyone has done any varnish stripping of their own and has some tips to share, I'd love to hear them!

Here's how a table leg looked after stripping, but before staining: