Expert: Eileen Cronk - 1/28/2009

Question
I live in an apartment house built in the 1920's. The door and window frames have beautiful detailed moulding but many layers of paint.  A repairman stripped one of the door frames using Peel Away 1.  He applied the Peel Away 1 twice using the paper that Peel Away recommends to contain the remover and prevent it from drying.  He has done this twice, the first time the Peel Away 1 was left on over night (about 30 hours) and the second time it was left on for about 10 hours.  The paint did not peel off and there were clumps of old paint left on the frame.  He then used stripper to try to remove the remaining paint.  However there are still major areas on the frame where the paint still remains. What would you recommend as a next step? The underlying wood (oak) looks beautiful and I would love to see this project completed successfully.  Thanks for you help

Answer
Hi Ann
Nice to hear from you.
We do not have this Peel Away here in my area (Canada), but I just looked it up. It says it will remove up to 32 coats of paint in one application. Obviously this is not the case, but this type of stripping is the hardest you will ever come across and I am not faulting the stripper or the repairman who made the attempt.
What I would next attempt is a heat gun to remove these clumps then follow this with an MC stripper to clean the wood of any residue.
A heat gun is fairly inexpensive and easy to use.
You must be careful though as you can scortch the wood if you concentrate the heat in one area too long. The idea is to soften the paint and scrape it off with a scraper. You will still have residue after this but the MC paint stripper will handle that.
Here is the stripper I use
http://www.swingpaints.com/1806.htm
Hope this helps.
Kind Regards
Eileen