You are looking at a room in our house called "The Ann Cave." This is where my partner (her name is Ann if you didn't get that) retreats to watch golf and play her ukelele. That mantel and hearth looked a lot different when we bought the house. In fact, here it is as we first found it:
Yummy.
While our contractor worked on other parts of the house, our job was to tackle the fireplace. The mantel was covered with many layers of white and aqua(!) paint. Fortunately, underneath the carpet and plywood, all the original tile was still in place.
What You Need
Materials
- Paint Stripper
Tools
- Rubber gloves
- Metal Scraper
- Paintbrush
- Wire brush
- Heat gun
- Rags
- Receptacle for removed paint
Instructions
Part 1: The Mantel
I'm going to say this first: I don't recommend the paint stripper we used. It was 100% toxic, and burned my nostrils and skin. Really miserable stuff. I've since used the citrus based stuff on other projects and it is SOOOO much better. Not only is the smell less horrifying, but I got to keep all my skin layers this time around.
No matter what, wear heavy duty rubber gloves (the long dishwashing variety works nicely) and work in a well ventilated area, or outside if possible. This project is nothing short of messy, so pick a place you don't care about. We propped the mantel in our garage, on sawhorses,so it could lay flat, and opened all the doors.
1. Since a mantel like this is big, you might want to work in sections so the remover doesn't have a chance to evaporate or dry before you get to it. Get started by covering a section of the wood liberally with the gel. Don't be shy with the stuff, or brush it on thinly as you would with paint. When you have a good thick layer on, walk away for a while.
Tip: Let the gel do the work for you. I was overly eager the first time and wanted to dive right in. I wound up scraping a lot more than I needed to. If I recall, it took at least 20 minutes, if not more. After the first application, you'll know the optimal waiting time.
You want it to look like this before you start scraping:
2. After a number of minutes, start slowly and tediously scraping off the paint that's been loosened by the stripper. Don't scrape so hard that it gouges the wood; just enough to get through the paint. It will be disgusting and you'll have to clean off your scraper often.
Tip: Before you start scraping, go ahead and apply gel to the next section of wood. That way, while you scrape, the gel can work its magic at the same time.
3. If there were multiple coats of paint, not everything will come up right away, but don't worry. You can always go back later and reapply. Repeat until you've removed most of the paint from the wood.
4. Once the majority of the paint is off, then go back and fine tune. If your project has lots of detail, you might have to experiment to find the right tool to get in the crevices. This is where the wire brush came in handy for me. Whatever you choose, don't go at it too hard; you don't want to damage the wood in these special spots.
5. Once all the paint is off, wipe off with a wet sponge or cloth until it's clean.
Part 2: The Hearth
Next, turn your attention to the hearth. Hopefully yours is as clean as a shiny penny, so you won't have to do this. As I mentioned earlier, ours was intact under the carpet, but it was also covered in what looked suspiciously like stick-on parquet tile. If you don't know what the material is, experiment with a couple of things. After trying a few options, I found heat worked best in this situation:
1. Hold the heat gun near the tile for a couple of minutes, until the rubber? adhesive? starts to soften and you can scrape it off.
2. After that it's pretty much elbow grease. Scrape and scrape (again, somewhat gently so as to not crack the tile) until all the yucky stuff is gone.
Unfortunately, once everything was off, I discovered that some of the tiles were cracked. Boo. But that's a project for another day. In the meantime, it looks fifty times better.
(Images: Dabney Frake)
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Gorgeous results! Well worth all that hard work.
Well, the fireplace looked nice enough before that I bet a lot of people wouldn't have bothered stripping it. The after is gorgeous though, and clearly worth all of the effort. And the entire room, wow, what an improvement!
Also, I love that you call it "The Ann Cave".
The oak is beautiful - great job. PLEASE THOUGH, whenever you are dealing with old paint (pre-1977) be extremely cautious of lead dust. My nephew is a casulty of lead poisoning and will have issues for the rest of his young life due to old paint dust. Do your research and take every precaution.
Nice job. I don't know that I would have seen the potential in the original mantel, but the end result is so much better.
A gorgeous mantle! It looks like it was well worth the effort. I bet it made it so much easier to work on the mantle when it was on horses than on the wall (flipping the house of it's side is such a pain nowadays).
I've had to resort to the really nasty paint strippers to get off numerous coats of poly or really thick layers of paint. It's nasty work, but they take off nearly everything. You need to use chemical resistant gloves (from the hardware store) to protect yourself. Safety glasses/goggles are a must (sad to see in the 5th picture no glasses!).
A good thing to do to your metal scraper is to round the corners of the blade: this prevents them from gouging into the wood and creating streaks.
Also essential for stripping any painted piece with lots of crevices - dental tools! My husband and I stripped a mantel in our last rental apartment (with landlord approval), which had a huge amount of egg-and-dart was painted with about 10 coats of paint. The dental tools really got into the cracks and crevices of seams, as well as all of the egg-and-dart areas, and removed every lick of paint left behind by the stripper. We bought the dental tools online.
I recommend the Peel Away brand stripper, which is also non-toxic and is thicker (i.e. less drippy) than the citrus stuff.
That's great! Can you put a nice clear nitrocellulose lacquer on it!?
Hate golf and no interest in the ukelele, but I think I really like Ann.
:-)
Thank you AT for NOT showing us another "Paint it White" over good wood to "brighten a room" post. Enough is enough. Show some respect and restraint, please. Beautiful work, Ann!
Beautiful job, such an improvement!
Mantel looks great! How nice to see fine old wood respected instead of painted! AT please take note!
I would have like more explanation about the final stages, i.e. going from "most of the paint off" to "all paint off". The few times I've stripped something, I could never get all the paint off. In the "After' photo, the upper left rosette still appears to have some paint around it--or is this a trick of the light?
Also, how did you finish the mantel? Again, a beautiful job--and so nice to see something restored instead of painted.
We've had great luck with Citrus Strip or SmartStrip (the safer version of Peel-Away), followed by dental tools. We are able to get about 99% of the paint off with stripper and another 0.9% off with dental tools. (The dental tool stage takes almost as long as the stripper stage though!) For any bits that we just can't get off, I touch them up with extra coats of gel stain. If you look closely, you can still see traces of paint. It takes careful inpsection, though.
So beautiful! Thanks for this.
Amazing work, it turned out beautiful! Thanks for the tutorial and the pictures of the process. I really appreciate "it should look like this" type pictures, those are so useful. Silly question, but how did you get the mantle OFF the wall? (I really have no idea about these things!)
And I have to chuckle... someone always painting things white, and someone's always stripping off paint. Oh well, as long as things get reused and recycled and loved, it's all good.
Looks fabulous. Why did they paint wood rather than refinish?
We did the same with marble but it had been painted red! http://brownstonecyclone.com/2012/06/14/stripping-paint-off-a-fireplace-mantel/
Gorgeous!!! Good work!
Wow, what an absolutely gorgeous job! I really wish more people would do this (or not paint their woodwork in the first place). It also looks like your mantle is "Tiger Oak" which is now extinct.