This is the door to/from hell.
If you think it's ugly now, you should have seen it before. The paint was peeling, cracked, and falling off in places. A couple of different colors were showing through. It was badly weathered (it's an outside door) and showed about 100 years of wear and neglect.
We needed to save it. Here is the result.
Hmmm. Not the look we were going for. Buoyed by our success with the wood stripper on the bedroom floor, we smeared some of the magical orange stuff on this door and waited for the paint to gently fall away into waiting buckets.
Didn't happen. Instead, it just gummed up an already ratty looking paint job. It was hard to scrape off the residue and impossible to get it out of the small details. The original redwood was soft and gouged easily. The more we scraped the more we damaged the wood.
Repeated applications of different chemical wood strippers didn't help much, but did change the smell of the project. And the color of the mess. Strip, scrape, despair, repeat.
I tried my new Dremel tool on the old paint, which did kind of work but is like seeding a lawn one blade of grass at a time. Handling a power tool (even a small one) worked off some frustration but wasn't really helping the door that much.
Three days into it we finally gave up and said, &*$# it, we're painting it!
Now it's every bit as ugly... but one color. It looks good from a distance, though.
