So the whole sanding the old paint off the cabinets and doors didn’t work so well. It was taking sooooo much time that we would be working on this kitchen for the next twelve months and I cannot have that! After spending an hour and a half on one side of one cabinet door, we decided to step back and punt. Off we went to Home Depot (I like their paint products better than Lowes. Nothing personal because I like Lowes better for other things). We bought the strongest paint stripper they had and went to town. It worked well…until it didn’t. Watch the video below to find out what NOT to do!

It seemed like the prep stage drug out for so long, but now it’s done and we can move on to making some progress toward getting our kitchen back! Part of the prep process was caulking the cabinets next to the wall. Y’all, caulk is my new #realtor rehab best friend…so much so that it got it’s own blog post! Go take a look…it will be worth your two minutes!

After trial and error, I can honestly say that if you’re going to tackle this job, you definitely need to learn from our mistakes 🙂 Here are the details:

WHAT DID WE USE: The stripper we used was Back to Nature Multi Strip Advanced Professional Paint Remover. We asked the associate at Home Depot and he said this was the strongest stuff they sell. And it really does work quite well! Beware: it does have a strong odor. It’s so strong, that after we applied it to the cabinet shells, we decided to open the kitchen windows and put a fan in the kitchen to blow air out. We were going to be gone for several hours, leaving the dogs to hang out in that smell and we didn’t want it to affect them negatively. PS, they were fine 🙂

WHAT DID WE LEARN:

For the love of all things holy, DO NOT LET THE PAINT STRIPPER DRY! Let is sit for 2-3 hours, then scrap right off. If you have some stubborn spots, instead of fighting them, reapply and do something else for a little while. Those second coats didn’t take 2-3 hours to work.
Use cheap paint brushes to apply. There is no need in breaking the bank for paint brushes that you are just going to throw away when you’re done with the stripping process. If you’re stripping takes more than one day, store that baby in a zip lock back in the refrigerator over night. It will be good as new the next day.
When stripping the cabinets, lay down trash bags to catch the falling paint and to protect your floors. It will make clean up MUCH easier!
If you have the space, consider a second location for stripping and sanding. Since the cabinet doors and shelves are laid out in our garage, we set up our pop up tent beside the house and used a make shift table out of saw horses and a piece of wood. We laid a tarp under us on the ground to catch the junk. We took each door to that spot and scraped off the paint.
Let the cabinets and doors dry before sanding. Once you have stripped off the paint, the doors are going to be a little bit moist. Give them a day to dry out before you start sanding, otherwise the remaining stripper (in the corners) will be a gooey mess. Like with the stripping, we took each door out to the pop up tent and sanded them there. This kept everything in the garage from having a thin coat of sand all over it. Hey, the less I gotta clean up, the better. LOL!
Clean those cabinets well! After you sand, wipe them down, vacuum them well (especially the corners), then go to town with the tack cloth.

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