Stripping Paint Off an Old Side Table

The side table had been in a family member’s garage for years, small enough to fit beside a couch and solid enough that I could tell it was real wood under a thick coat of white paint. I wanted to strip it back to bare wood and either stain it or leave it lightly finished. I guessed one layer of paint under the visible top coat. There turned out to be six, in five different colors, which is most of why a project I expected to take a weekend took closer to a month.

Guessing wrong about how many layers

My first pass with chemical stripper took off the top white coat and revealed a pale yellow underneath, which I assumed was the original finish. It was not. Under the yellow was a pale green, then a darker green, then a reddish brown, then finally what looked like the original wood tone. Each layer needed its own application of stripper and its own round of scraping, since one coat of stripper rarely cut through more than one or two paint layers at a time.

Working with chemical stripper repeatedly over several sessions meant I got more careful about ventilation as the project went on. I moved the whole operation to a covered porch for the later sessions instead of doing it indoors near an open window, which made the fumes much less of an issue and let me work longer without needing frequent breaks for fresh air. Gloves throughout, and a mask for the driest scraping stages once most layers were already off and I was down to fine dust.

The color layers, in order

Finding five paint colors under the surface was oddly interesting, like reading the table’s history backward. Whoever painted it green clearly lived with it a long time, since that layer was thicker than the others, like it had been touched up more than once without fully stripping the coat before. The reddish brown layer closest to the wood might have been an early attempt at staining rather than paint, since it was thinner and soaked in slightly rather than sitting on top.

Six layers meant six small decisions about how hard to push the scraper before the wood underneath showed through, and I dented the surface once from pushing too hard on a layer that turned out to be thinner than I expected.

The dent I caused and how I dealt with it

That one dent, on the edge of the tabletop, came from scraping too aggressively once I realized how many layers were ahead of me and started rushing. It was not deep, but it was visible under raking light once the wood was bare. I filled it with a small amount of wood filler tinted close to the surrounding wood tone, sanded it flush once dry, and it disappears under the stain I eventually chose. A slower scraping pace on the remaining layers avoided a repeat of that mistake.

The stalled week

After getting through four of the six layers, I stopped for about a week. Partly this was scheduling, and partly it was a low-grade frustration at how much longer the project was taking than planned. Sitting with a half-stripped table in view of the couch, patchy with different paint colors in different spots, was not a pretty stretch of time. Coming back to it after the break did not require any real motivation, more just picking a Saturday and deciding that was the day the last two layers were coming off.

Getting to bare wood and choosing a finish

Once all six layers were off, a final light sanding with 220 grit paper evened out the surface and removed the last traces of stripper residue. The bare wood underneath had a nice grain, better than I expected given how much paint had been hiding it, likely a mid-grade hardwood rather than the pine I had guessed at the start.

I chose a simple oil-based finish over a full stain, wanting the natural wood tone rather than adding another layer of color to a piece that had already worn five. Two coats, applied with a rag and wiped back before fully drying, gave it a low sheen that suits the room.

What surprised me

The biggest surprise was not the difficulty of any single step but how much time the sheer number of layers added up to. Each layer alone would have been a reasonable weekend project. Six of them, spread across a month with a stalled week in the middle, felt at times like a project with no visible end. It did end, though, and the table has held up well since, with no sign of the dent and no regrets about the extra time it took to get there.