Refinishing Our Kitchen Cabinets - Day 17

So progress is slow on house remodeling projects that don't pay while you have four other occupations that do pay.  So Day 17 is coming many days after Day 16, but it is actually the next actual day of progress.

Here are a couple of things to note:
1 - The cabinet face on the pantry wasn't going to be sanded by hand in place effectively enough, so we painstakingly removed it, and
2 - I am not patient enough to strip.  (That was an awkward sentence . . . )

SPF informed me last night, after looking at the progress on the drawers, that I would need to do another round of stripper to get them clean.  I decided not to do that, and instead to beg and plead with him to do it for me.  So I agreed to do everything else of a housekeeping, floor prepping, remodeling nature while he did that for me.

 The first thing that SPF did was to stand the drawers on end so that the surface that needed to be stripped would be flat, so that more stripper would sit in place and not drip off, allowing the chemical reaction to take place in greater quantity and for a longer time.

 He also took the opportunity to strip the cabinet facing at the same time, so he laid that out on a table next to the upstanding drawers.

 Sort of an odd looking thing, isn't it?

 Good ol' stripper.  Another round for the cabinet face,

 and even more poured directly onto the drawer faces themselves.  With this orientation of the drawers, you can slop on as much as you need and then just sort of move it around with the brush (a demoted pastry brush that hasn't been used in years because we ran out of chip brushes) and voila, you get a less temperamental surface, no stripper on your toes, and an effective chemical reaction.

 SPF tells me that I didn't do anything wrong, it just sometimes takes two rounds of stripper.

 None-the-less, it's disappointing that the stripping still isn't done!  I'm good at the next part, so I'm eager to finish these off.

 Goooooooooop.

After lots of attention with the stripper and the scraper, SPF used steel wool to get the last remnants off.  The drawers are all drying now, ready to be sanded tomorrow.  But the floor project is quickly approaching, so I need to hurry!!!

Along with the cabinet face came the small piece of molding that goes between the cabinet face and the ceiling.

With the brush loaded with stripper, that little piece gets attention, too.  I don't know how I would have managed that with just the sanding.  This is a better solution.

Speaking of sanding, that was the area I sanded, so all the stripper is doing here is pulling up the last bit of stain and ensuring that if there are any other areas that were missed, they will be gotten now.  Where I didn't sand, the stripper was hard at work.

Here's the stripper at it's best.  Cutting through the over-painted area and the old poly at the same time.  Love it!

The sad thing about pulling off the whole cabinet face is that I had already completed one side of the face when I did the fridge surround.  So this section is going to take a couple of turns with the stripper and I am watching my good work melting away.  Sigh.  Isn't the first time, though.   We had to strip a whole door I had redone when I was still trying to refinish the doors in the sun.  The stain dried on before I could get it off.  The door was basically black and we had to revisit it.  So, this isn't really that bad . . .

Now we just need to get this stuff done, nail the cabinet face back in place, hang the doors, replace the drawers, and fill the drawers with all their stuff before we have to pull all of the furniture out for the flooring demo.

No sweat.