How to Strip Paint!!

If you’ve never tried to strip paint before it can be an intimidating idea… but I’m here to tell you it’s not nearly as scary as it sounds! I received these coasters as part of my Thrift Store Swap package… which means I had to rack my brains for a great idea of what to do with them!

I knew I wanted to cover them with wallpaper… but to do that I needed a clean slate!

So I decided to go out on a limb and foray into my very first paint striping adventure.

It was so easy!

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Check out those coasters! You can see from the water rings that the paint is already starting to come off… it just needed a little help from my friend SuperStrip!

Remember when working with SuperStrip that it is definitely heavy duty… which means you don’t want it to touch your skin! If it does it will burn! Trust me… I tested it out for you 😉 The good news is that a little cold water (aka shoving your arm under the tap) will stop the burning in it’s tracks. The other good news is that a good pair of gloves will keep you from ever getting burned. I forgot that part… I did say this was my first time!

Once you have put your gloves on cover your coasters (or other item… this stuff works on wood, metal, masonry and a bunch of other stuff so it’s pretty useful for just about any project!) with Super Strip. A little goes a long way so I probably overdid it… let’s just say I was very generous. See how a light layer of the Super Strip has started to distort the coaster below? Check out the second picture… after just a few minutes you can see the paint slide off into the goop… yes goop!

After a couple of moments I used a foam brush to wipe the paint off of my coasters… this was my first indication that the coasters were definitely white underneath! It was also my first reminder that this stuff is highly acidic… check out that brush! It’s losing it’s form after just one coaster… please remember gloves people! If you have gloves this project is quick, easy and totally safe. Without gloves your hands may get a tingly feeling you wish they didn’t have!

Once the majority of the paint was off the coasters (and into the goop!) I picked up each coaster (say it with me now: wearing gloves!) and washed it off in the sink. Once they were completey rinsed off I laid them aside to dry!

That’s it!

See? Super easy! The only thing left to do is dispose of your used SuperStrip. Since I did my whole project in a blue container I simply threw the container away… make sure to use a disposable container because you won’t want to clean it out afterwards. Of course if you use a very little amount of SuperStrip you might be able to do the whole project in the sink. The goop slides around easily though so I wanted a container that would… well contain.

Check out how white those tiles are! Crazy right? The before and after here is like night and day… two completely different pictures! For my second SuperStrip project I cleaned the paint tinter at work… that’s right I USED this stuff to clean years worth of gunked up paint off the tinter at my very own Sherwin-Williams. Worked like a charm! Of course I did have to let it sit for longer than 5 minutes… but that is to be expected since it had several layers of paint to eat through!

Moral of the story: wear gloves and let your goop work. If you are working through 10 layers give it a minute or two!