It's been two years since I removed all the doors and drawers from my bathroom. I'd meant to re-paint them and re-install them with new hardware, but they've been sitting in the garage all this time. The bathroom cabinets, like the ones in my utility room, had had latex paint applied directly over oil paint, and it wasn't long before the paint started peeling off. This drawer seemed to be the worst of the bunch and was what instigated the cabinet makeover.
I thought it would be a quick job to remove that layer of latex, but it wasn't. I tried using the orbital sander, but it took off too much of the finish, down to the bare wood in places. Sanding by hand seemed way too slow and time-consuming, and I wasn't getting anywhere, so I quit.
Lately though, while removing a wallpaper border, I found my five-in-one tool did a great job of sliding under and lifting the wallpaper off the wall. Today I laid dropcloth in the living room, brought a few drawers inside, and started scraping. In many places the layer of latex peeled off in strips; in other places it took lots of scraping. Scrape, scrape, scrape. It's a good exercise in persistence. And me and my five-in-one tool are getting to be friends.
The most time consuming part is cleaning paint out of the routed grooves that border each piece. I am folding 80 grit sandpaper into narrow two inch lengths to slide in the grooves. It's not a big deal I guess, since these doors aren't made of particularly good wood, but I want to save some of the house's original handiwork. I think I have eight more pieces to do. If I can finish one every other day I should be done in just over two weeks.
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