Stripping Furniture With Oven Cleaner

Another sweet find from a thrift store! If I remember right, I think this was around $15. These little cabinets make excellent side tables/nightstands/etc. I was dying to see what was under that old orange stain!

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I had initially tried a furniture stripping agent and it didn’t work great, so I used oven cleaner after I cleaned all of the strip off. It took a couple of coats and a lot of scrubbing, but it came off…most of it. There were a few spots on the edges that didn’t come off great, but I liked how it looked so I left it. This photo below is when I used the furniture strip. I’m pretty sure all of that stuff on there is just furniture strip coming off.

If you follow me on Instagram you will know that I did not mean to use this furniture strip, I grabbed the wrong bottle. I was actually trying to use a green product furniture cleaner that can work as a strip for these old pieces. Luckily the other strip came off with a lot of scrubbing and then I just switched to using the oven cleaner since I was out of the green cleaner that I had intended to use.

This project was definitely a project of trial and error. I scrubbed the hardware with barkeepers friend and the gold started showing through but there were spots on the edges that were still really tarnished, so I thought maybe throwing it in a crockpot of vinegar for hours on high would help.

It was pretty with the gold showing through and I could’ve left it like that, but I wanted to try to have all of the gold showing through. I could tell that the handles of the hardware were not changing much with all of the scrubbing.

I left it in the crockpot on high with vinegar for about three hours and then tried to scrub it again and there wasn’t really any change at all. I decided to put some salt in with the vinegar and left it for another hour or two and it ended up turning it a copper color.

I forgot to take a photo of it when it was the copper color, but even when I was showing it on my Instagram stories, it didn’t really look copper in the video. So weird. I decided to use European rub n buff so that it would be cohesive and gold. The copper color was cute, but then I realized there was an ornamental piece on the middle top drawer that was still a tarnished looking gold and it looked funny with all of the copper and gold together. I should have just used the rub n buff to start out with because it looks great and old!

It turned out so cute! And, I love the different shades of wood coloring. I think it gives it more character.

I’m so happy with the final result! I ran out of my flat sealer so sealing will have to wait. If we end up using it in a place that it won’t get high traffic, I may just leave it without sealer.

The next photo (below) is showing lighter on the drawers because of the lighting but I wanted to show the wood character on the top. That’s what was hiding under all of that old stain!

I’m always amazed how old the wood looks after taking off the old stain. I love the old primitive look of it now.

The hardware goes so well with the cabinet and is much more cohesive after using the rub n buff.

I think it would look great with casters added too! Casters are such a cute touch that adds so much character!