A Reddit user in the mountain west spent four months of nights and weekends stripping the woodwork in their 1913 Craftsman bungalow, every interior door, every piece of trim, the hall built-in, all of it.
Some renovations start with a plan. This one started with curiosity, and a paint scraper.
Reddit user u/Fuzzy-Sort809 bought a 1913 Craftsman bungalow in the mountain west and inherited what almost every century-home owner inherits: gorgeous old fir woodwork buried under generations of paint. White over teal over peach over green over white again. Five to six layers in most places, going back more than a hundred years.
Most people would have rolled a fresh coat over it and moved on. Some would have ripped the doors out and replaced them with hollow-core builder specials. This homeowner picked the third, hardest option: take it all back to the wood the original carpenters left behind.
It took them four months.
What They Actually Did
The scope, in their own words: five and a half doors (every interior door in the house except the inside of one closet), all the door trim, the hall built-in cabinet and drawers, and every piece of hardware, knobs, hinges, plates, all of which had also been painted a million times over.
The work happened entirely on nights and weekends from December through April.
“All in all it was very tedious and I questioned my choices a lot. Would I recommend it? Not sure. But I love the end result, so I can’t say I regret it,” they wrote.
That ambivalence is the most honest thing anyone has ever said about a paint-stripping job, and it’s exactly why this post struck a nerve. They aren’t selling anyone on the dream. They’re telling the truth.
The Method Was Almost Boringly Simple
There’s no exotic chemical here. No specialty stripper. No infrared gun. Just a basic heat gun on its lowest setting and a putty knife.
Their workflow, in order:
- Heat gun on low, held a few inches from the surface
- Slow, patient scraping with a putty knife, lifting paint off in strips
- Strips dropped into a metal bucket to cool before going into the trash bag (lead paint precaution)
- Steel wool with acetone, plus light sanding, to remove the final flecks of paint
- Stain, Varathane in Gunstock
- A clear shellac topcoat to finish
Thick gloves and long sleeves protected against burns from the gun and the heated-up paint. They wore PPE throughout because they assumed (correctly, for a 1913 home) that the lower paint layers contained lead.
That’s the entire system. The reason it worked is patience, not equipment.
What Made the Paint Come Off So Cleanly
Here’s the detail that made other century-home owners in the comments physically jealous.
When the original carpenters installed this woodwork in 1913, they shellacked it. Shellac is a thin, glossy finish made from a natural resin, and it was the standard finish for built-in millwork in Craftsman homes of that era. Every subsequent owner who slapped on paint was painting on top of that century-old shellac layer.
That sealed surface turned out to be the secret. Because the paint never bonded directly to bare wood, the layers came up together once heat softened them.
“I feel we got lucky in that the paint layers came up all together most of the time,” the homeowner wrote. “The shellac original finish on the bottom underneath all the paint also helped the paint almost glide off.”
One door was a real fight. The rest were a slow, satisfying peel.
The Hardware Was Its Own Project
Every doorknob, hinge, and strike plate had been painted over for decades, the screw heads filled in with so much old paint that they had to be excavated before anything could be unscrewed.
The process: chip carefully around each screw head with a knife, clear the slot enough to get a screwdriver in, remove the hardware, then take the whole bundle through a cleaning regimen — boiling the pieces, scrubbing with a wire brush, polishing with Bar Keeper’s Friend. They also tried re-brass-plating the knobs with a kit, with limited success. The hardware in the after photos is original 1913, just freed from a century of paint.
The glass knobs alone are worth the labor.
What It Looks Like Now
The after photos are the reason this post crossed 600 upvotes on a single comment that just said “Your house looks so much warmer now.”
The hallway reads like a different house. Warm, honey-colored fir doors and trim against soft neutral walls. A terracotta bedroom (Auburn Glaze by Behr, for anyone asking) glowing against the dark wood. A built-in cabinet that looks like it was always meant to be the heart of the hallway. The character that 1913 Craftsman bungalows were designed to have, restored.
The Honest Verdict
Asked whether the result was worth it, the homeowner gave the most useful answer anyone considering this project will ever get.
“I know had we gone with another paint layer or new cheap doors, I wouldn’t be as happy,” they wrote.
Not “you should do this.” Not “it was easy.” Just: knowing what the alternatives would have felt like, this was the right call. That’s the standard worth holding any 100-hour renovation project to.
If you’re sitting in a century home staring at painted-over woodwork, the takeaway isn’t that you need a fancy tool or a chemistry degree. It’s that a heat gun, a putty knife, four months of patience, and the willingness to question your choices a few hundred times can give you back a hundred years.
The doors don’t lie. They look like it’s 1913 again.
Images via u/Fuzzy-Sort809 on r/centuryhomes. Stain: Varathane in Gunstock. Topcoat: clear shellac. Wall paint in the bedroom: Auburn Glaze by Behr.
