Remember last year when I posted about this card catalog my mom gave me?

It’s been sitting in my garage ever since.

The week before last I finally decided It Was Time. So I painstakingly unscrewed all the hardware from all the little drawers and coated everything with an eco-friendly varnish stripper called Ready-Strip. I haven’t taken too many pictures yet, but this is the progress so far:

This would be 2 sections of the cabinet (the rest is being worked on in the basement, I was too lazy to move the whole unit to one central place). As you can see on the top, this needs a lot of TLC. I’m working on stripping away all the varnish so I can stain this a rich black. Then I’m going to put it in my dining room, I think. So anyway, this is while the stripper was working.

This is after the stripper set in and I scraped it all off, sanded, and cleaned the surface. The whole unit (especially the tiny drawers, they were a nightmare) needed a 2nd coat of stripper, there was just too much to sand off. I took a break from this project for a week, and now I’ve put more stripper on it. Tomorrow I will be scraping, cleaning, and sanding again, and I’ll report back on the progress after that.

It is a tedious, exhausting, hot job, but I’m really hoping this will look stunning when I’m through with it.