The saga of the roach-infested machine continues (see 'It's all your fault').
I want to refinish the original cabinet, so last week i gathered all the required tools and assorted fluids necessary. Applied a coat of stripper, scraped it off, applied another coat of stripper, scraped it off, and on and on.
After a couple of days, it started to look better, but not the way I wanted. We went to the paint store and bought another can of stripper, this time stronger than the first one. Same exercise, apply, scrape, repeat. The problem was the front panel which has trim on it. Everytime i scraped it, the stripper seemed to gum up and congeal, making it almost impossible to get off. It looked worse the more we did it. Using a tough plastic scrubbie didn't work; neither did a wire brush.
So, it was back to the paint store this morning to get the industrial strength stripper. We were convinced that the previous owners had put something on that panel; what it was, we didn't know.
We had to use it outdoors, so we transferred everything outside and soaked the thing with stripper. When we began scraping it off, my DH flipped it to get better leverage. He looked at the underside and said 'I know why we can't scrape it clean...it's PLASTIC! Argh!
Talk about feeling stupid! After we finished laughing at ourselves, he removed the fake panel and we will replace it with wood.
I had no idea they did this, it looked real!