There are 2 kinds of painters....

In our quest to restore our late 1800's Primitive Cabinet, we learned a cool new-to-us trick.  Thank you Internet for your wealth of information.  So far we've removed as much of the cracked paint as we could,  with a heat gun & scraper.  It was a long a tedious process, but very effective to get the majority of the paint off- without sending it the paint dust everywhere.  After that, we used 40 grit sandpaper to remove excess paint and sand down the finish below.  This part was also to rough up the areas where we did not remove the paint (interior), so that the new paint adheres better.  The laird is currently rebuilding the top of the cabinet, as it had been previously chopped on one end (no decorative trim), and had an un-level, unmatched piece right down the middle- that had been added as some later point in it's life.  Next step will be to build the interior shelf- as we plan to use it as extra storage in our kitchen.

Back to the title of the post.  I found this quote quite comical as I was searching the Internet for a paint removal trick.  "There are 2 kinds of painters, those who remove hardware from furniture, doors & cabinets prior to painting, and those who do not- an just paint right over the hardware."  I have come across this numerous times in my re-painting and stripping paint off doors- there's often paint caked on the hinges and door knobs.  And in that case, I simply follow suite and do the same, so at least the new paint matches.  Plus it's the quick way to re-paint.

The primitive cabinet has 2 hinges and a lock mechanism for each door (4 hinges & 2 locks total).  And like most old painted furniture with hardware, these hinges and locks indeed had a few coats of paint sloped on them (though not completely covered).  I tried to use the heat gun to remove the paint, but it was tedious and didn't quite work.

I figured I would be able to soak them in a chemical bath and the job would be a snap- or at least not too difficult.  So I came inside from the workshop (a.k.a. the garage) and searched: "How to remove paint from metal hinges".  And all the top search results produces the same, simple method.

Place paint covered metal hardware into a crock pot with water and liquid soap.  Turn on high setting and cook for a number of hours.  I then turned the hot water bath off and let the water cool until the pieces were cool enough to handle.  I used gloves and a scrub sponge, and scraped of as much of the paint as I could.  The results were good.  I didn't take as much time as I could to get the paint out of the small cracks and crevices, but they look so much better than they did.  I have read that polishing them with beeswax polish cleans them right up.  I may or may not try it, since we're still trying the keep the primitive look of the cabinet.

One thing I read is that if you do this, you may want to use an old crock pot.  Since some of the paint may contain lead, you would not want to contaminate your cookware.  My crock pot has 3 different size bowls, so I used the smallest that we've never used before (and likely won't ever use)- just in case there is risk of contamination.  We have a septic system, so we dumped the small amount of bath water outside, in order to prevent any issues with our septic water.  You may want to do some research before attempting this project, since you may be dealing with lead paint.  Cooking the paint off the hinges created some nasty fumes, so we were sure to dump the water outside before scraping the paint, in order to limit inhaling the fumes.


That was a simple and fun trick we learned this weekend!  Wanted to share the knowledge with all of you.