So last Friday, after I was done with classes for the day, I drove back home to (finally!) work on the cabinet some more. On the way home, I stopped at Home Depot to buy a scraper.
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| Wrong tool for the job! |
Once I brought it home, I started working, and I did have the foresight to use it in an inconspicuous spot. I'm glad I did, because it immediately started gouging the MDF. I tried other tools including a block plane and a card scraper. The block plane took strips of paint off the likes of which I have only seen from a finely tuned smoothing plane, but only for about five passes; after that it wouldn't do anything. The card scraper didn't do much of anything. I took the scraper back to HD, and bought the correct one, along with some CitriStrip (paint stripper made for acrylic latex paint), a plastic scraper (CitriStrip recommended it), and a set of painter's pyramids (actually tetrahedrons).
Once I finally got back to the house, I got cracking!
I started out by trying a test spot in the inside of the cabinet, and applied it with a paper towel. After I did that, and that worked successfully, I started on the rest of the cabinet. For the first side, I used a paper towel; once I finished that side, I decided that the paper towel was too much work.
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| Swirls don't matter, but work does! |
Once again, I went to HD and got a 4" paint brush. That worked a lot better, and sped up the process immensely.
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| Much better! |
I spent until midnight scraping paint off. I still wasn't done, but decided to wait until morning to finish it. I had a guitar lesson back in Denton at 1:00, so I had to finish it pretty quickly. I ended up getting up at 11:00, so I didn't have much time to finish it, but I did manage.
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| Mostly done. Also, the scraper. |
This was a very nasty job, and I hope I never have to do it again. This is definitely a lesson that a job is worth doing correctly the first time, even if it is harder; because now, I have to do that same job that I didn't want to do, except this time after doing that same job I don't like.
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