Piecemeal project

When we bought this house back in 2007, one of our first projects was to refinish the kitchen cabinets. They were all natural wood with a beautiful grain, but it was somewhat hard to see under the heavy varnish. So we took off all the doors, laid them out in the (at the time) unfinished basement, and stripped them with a product called "Safest Stripper," which took about 24 hours to work but was safer and less smelly than anything else we could find. Then we gave them a coat of wood conditioner to raise the grain, followed by a couple of coats of a nontoxic water-based finish.

In hindsight, this eco-friendly product may not have been the best choice. Over the 19 years since, the finish has gradually worn away, particularly in the areas along the edges and around the handles that get touched most often. As a result, our lovely wood cabinets now look worse than they did before we first refinished them. 

This month, Brian and I agreed that it was about time we refinished them. However, we no longer have a large unfinished basement in which we can work on all the doors at once. Instead, we're tackling this project in a piecemeal fashion: pulling off just one or two doors at a time and taking them down to the workshop to be stripped, treated with wood conditioner, and refinished (this time with "water-based, oil-modified polyurethane," which we're hoping will hold up better than the old water-based finish).

It took a little trial and error to figure out the best way to get the old finish off. At first, Brian thought he could just sand the doors down as he did with all our interior doors ten years ago. He tested this process on the smallest section of cabinetry, the front panel of the little tilt-out drawer under the sink, and that piece came out okay—a bit lighter than the other doors, but we figured they'd all end up the same once they'd been refinished. But this turned out to be a slight miscalculation. When he tried the same process on two larger doors, he discovered that it took more sanding to get the finish off in the damaged areas around the edges than in the middle. As a result, the wood in those spots looked lighter than the rest, and the grain was less visible. So for the remaining doors, he switched back to chemical stripping. Fortunately, the product we have now, called Lift Off, while still nontoxic, works much faster than Safest Stripper. It only takes about five minutes to bubble off the old finish, so he can completely turn around one pair of doors—removed, stripped, cleaned, refinished, and reinstalled—in just a day or two.

While we had the doors off, Brian thought we should also have a go at cleaning the handles, which had never been really thoroughly scrubbed since we first installed them in 2014. It turns out that nifty basket-weave design that looked so cute when they were new is also really good at trapping particles of dirt and grease from the air. Soaking the handles overnight in a mild solution of dish soap brought all this hidden goo to the surface in a thick, sticky layer. A quick scrub with an old toothbrush removed most of it, but once the handles dried, little mottled patches appeared where some of the schmutz was left behind. (We know it's dirt and not the finish being scrubbed away, because it comes off when scraped with a fingernail.) So it will most likely take multiple rounds of scrubbing to get these fully clean.

This project is kind of a microcosm of all the home renovations we've done in the years since we bought this place. Our approach has always been to take as long as we need to do a good job on a low budget, rather than a quick-and-dirty rush job or a high-priced, high-end whirlwind makeover. We spent literally years after we moved in redoing our big basement room piece by piece, close to a year on the downstairs bath, half a year on the guest room, three months on the office closet doors, and over a year on the laundry room. So redoing these cabinet doors bit by bit, tackling one or two at a time and spending maybe an hour on them each day, is much more our style than setting aside one long weekend and trying to blast through the whole job at once.