My Career as a Stripper is Off to a Rocky Start; Franmar's Soy Gel is a Bust

All the wood trim in The Box House, and all of the wood doors, will eventually need to be stripped and refinished. Some of the wood is covered under many, many, many layers of paint. Some of it has been worn down to bare, grayish wood. And on most of it, the surface is coarse and bubbly, as if the varnish had been applied too thickly in the past, or, more likely, the wood was not cleaned and stripped before being revarnished.

Before the reality of what this task actually would entail sunk in, I was really looking forward to revealing all that lovely, lovely old growth wood.

Earlier this week, I had a night to myself at The Box House--the first night to myself in almost three years. Ted and Mom were at her other house, giving me a night completely on my own to destress and decompress. (I know I've been somewhat bitchy lately.)

Instead of just chilling by myself, maybe by watching a little bad TV or reading a trashy novel, I decided to start stripping the paint on the bathroom cabinet in my mom's unit as a surprise.


Ted and I used a Home Depot gift card we got for Christmas--the best kind of gift ever--to buy a respirator mask rated for lead paint:

I coated the exterior of the cabinet in Soy Gel paint remover, which had worked so well on our annunciator box. It claimed to be able to quickly strip several layers of paint at once, including latex and enamel. Ha! I left it on for a few hours, and it barely softened the first layer. I tried scrapping off as much as I could, slathered the Soy Gel on again, and left it overnight while I watched the original The Wicker Man on television, a much better movie than the Nicholas Cage remake.

Even with a good 12 hours, it still only barely was able to soften the top few layers, and not even all of that. Again, I scrapped off as much as I could, discovering that about three layers down was a layer of golden-yellow enamel paint. Damn. Its cast iron constitution didn't even flinch in the face of the Soy Gel.

Later in the day, Ted came back with the car and a few odds and ends from the other house. I had hoped by this time to proudly reveal the clean and bare wood of the medicine cabinet, but no dice. I hadn't even been able to soften the paint on the hardware enough to dig down to the screws to take the door off. But we gamely slathered on another coat of Soy Gel, this time on the hinges only, and went out for sushi.

Eventually, with some softening, scraping, and scrubbing with a wire brush, I found the screws and we were able to get the door off, which I carted to the basement, so completely sick of the whole thing that I couldn't even look at it anymore.

Still, we decided to give the Soy Gel one more try and coated the inside back of the cabinet with it as well as the frame.

By morning, the only section that had bubbled up is the chippy bit you see on the back. I attacked the cabinet with my carbide steel scraper, and was able to get off just enough paint to see that yes, the cabinet is indeed made of wood. Very solid, dense, thick-grained wood. Yes!

I didn't wear the mask in the morning, figuring that I wasn't actually discharging lead dust, and besides, I had the exhaust fan going the whole time. Still, something about the Soy Gel chemical itself made me sick, and I was puking the rest of the day. Poor Ted. He calls me his Canary because I am always the first one affected by chemically smells, and once I get a headache from something like this, that's it. I can't keep anything down in my stomach.

So now I'm feeling completely dejected and bummed out. I need to find some non-toxic or low-toxic product that actually works, as I have 30+ doors and miles of trim to refinish. Anyone have a suggestion for what has worked for them? Soy Gel has been a total bust; I had such high hopes based on their promo:

In addition Soy Gel goes a long way, with one gallon giving you up to 200 sq. ft. coverage. That's THREE times the coverage of most traditional strippers!! With SOY Gel you won't have to deal with harsh odors that we all know so well with other strippers. No odor SOY Gel is the perfect helper for anyone wanting to remove paints, urethanes, and enamels.

I've gone through more than half of a quart bottle already, and all I've had removed is the paint on my annunciator box and the first layer and maybe part of the second on the medicine cabinet. If I'm doing it wrong, I wish Franmar would come out and show me how to get it to work. Twenty bucks for a quart of the goo--which is certainly not "no odor" as they claim--is a bit steep.

Mail Call -- Annunciator Mailbox with Speaking Tube

Just inside the front door of our building and to the right is a two-unit mailbox with old-fashioned speaking tubes (called an annunciator, I'm told). It's set inside an oak wood frame. We had assumed the doorbell portion was broken, because when you push the buttons nothing happens.

The speaking tubes themselves are kind of primitive, rather like those old tin-can and a string phones we made when we were kids--do kids even make those anymore?--and they do work, although they probably haven't had much use in years.

The main door to The Box House has a deadbolt, and the current working doorbells are on the outside of the building. Nowadays, you can't even get into the stairwell unless you have a key or someone comes down to open the door. In the 1920s, when the house was built, nobody would think to put a lock on the entryway door.

At some point in time, the Previous Owner painted the brass portion with metallic gold paint. Although the intention was noble, the gold paint looks a little off. So I decided it needed to be stripped.

Quicker than you can say "special delivery," I unscrewed and pulled off one of the mailboxes. Lo and behold! (I love when I get to say things like lo and behold) the wires to the doorbell had simply become detached. Ted hooked them back up and the doorbell worked. I made him unhook them again so I could take it away and strip the paint.

I took the mailbox to Menard's to see what they recommended for stripping it without ruining whatever patina the brass might reveal. They didn't have any particular recommendation, so I took it home again and decided to try this SoyGel paint remover, which the manufacturer indicated would work on metal.

I slathered on a thin layer, and it already began to dissolve the paint before I could finish coating it. Twenty minutes later, I was wiping the paint off with a damp rag.

The patina itself doesn't look all that great, kinda splotchy and rust-colored in spots. Now I'm at a crossroads, should I get a brass polish and spiff it up or leave the very mottled patina as is--or should I have left the gold paint on in the first place? The paint looked bad, spiffing it might not work, and if it does it might look too shiny, but I'm not entirely pleased with the actual patina of the brass, either. It has what looks like brush strokes through it. (The photo makes it look better than it really is.)

The one on the right is painted gold;
the one on the left has had the paint stripped with Soy Gel.

When I pulled out the name label of the Previous Owner, behind it was another label, with the P.O.'s old address, which is literally just around the corner from The Box House. Ted and I got into one of those stupid four o'clock in the morning debates over whiskey as to whether the P.O.'s pulled out and brought over the entire mailbox and annunciator from their old place, or just the labels. And why would they keep the old address label anyway? I had to boot up the City of Evanston's Web site, which has pictures of all properties, to see what the house looked like. It was an old frame house with a porch, possibly divided into two units, which maybe had an annunciator. (Kinda neat to know where the previous owners previously lived, at any rate.)

Anyway, as to the further-polish-the-brass-or-not debate, I think we'll have to ponder it for a while before deciding definitively what to do with it. Mom votes to keep it as it is, sans paint and all splotchy. I'll finish up the other mailbox and reattach them both, and probably not get back to it for a year or more.