Refinishing a Mantle

At my old home the living room had a mantle that was originally painted over white. With how white/beige the house was I wanted to restore the mantle to it’s original walnut stained glory.

So to get started my wife and I tried a variety of methods to remove paint. We tried using Citristrip, but that didn’t really take off the paint after using a lot of the stripper. So then we read that you can use a head gun and a scraper to remove the paint. So we tried this method, but the paint was over an original stain and some clear finish (shellac or lacquer maybe?) that also melted and smelled terrible. Once it dried it turned into a hardened mix of paint and goo that was black. It stuck to everything that it got onto. It worked really well, but with the chance of getting burned from the sticky goo and the mess it made we ended up bypassing that as well. Finally we used the normal smelly paint stripper to try to clean up the rest of paint. This got us to 99% of where we needed to be. The final step that actually worked really well was using a scraper and water. I think either the paint stripper remanence or water softened the latex paint and made it scrape off in chips. This was really useful in the very small grooves on the front and sides as well as the hard to reach areas.

There were still some hard to reach areas that I couldn’t reach with the scraper mentioned above, but could with sandpaper. So I sanded with 220 grit sandpaper to remove any patches of paint I couldn’t scrape off. Finally after completing the stripping a quick sand was applied to everywhere I could get to to prep the wood to take the stain.

For staining I used Varathane Dark Walnut stain for this piece. I feel like the LVP on the floor matched this darker color so it just made sense to tie in the mantle with the floor and the rest of the room. I applied this as directed by the can, paint on, let sit for 2 minutes, wipe off excess with paper towel. I would advise if you try this to use a cloth instead because I went through like 2 rolls of paper towels and it was a mess. You can see it on the floor in this picture below.

I think the stain really brings out the warmth and character of the mantle. The color was definitely the right choice to pick for this piece. So I continued staining a small section at a time and wiping off the excess.

After applying the stain I let it sit overnight to cure and fully dry. The next day I wiped down the mantle again with more paper towels to make sure I got off the rest of the excess stain. This brings us to what topcoat I should use!

Since the fireplace is non-operable it didn’t really matter what topcoat I ended up using since it wouldn’t be exposed to any direct heat from a fire. Because of this I ultimately went with finishing wax as a topcoat. I did this for a few reasons:

1. I am really lazy and want to something that was low mess and easy to apply
2. I didn’t want something that sets up super glossy like polyurethane after it’s applied
3. I wanted something more natural
4. I thought about a penetrating oil, but only after staining

Ultimately I think this refinish really brings some original character back into the room. I am happy with how it turned out!

Some closing thoughts: I would have just stuck with the stinky paint stripper for the whole project. It still made a mess, but it wasn’t hot and couldn’t cause burns like the heat gun method. It also worked much faster than the Citristrip so I didn’t need to use as much or spend as much. The wood also had some smaller hairline cracks in it that I couldn’t get the paint out of. For the cracks that I could get the paint out of the wax filled in and showed as an opaque white color that you can see when you get close to the mantle. I’m not sure if a high quality wood putty could help fill in those cracks and still take the stain.