Welcome to Part 2 of this series on refinishing a wood bathroom vanity.

Catch up on Part 1 – Preparation & Stripping here.

Yesterday, we smeared stripping gel onto the vanity’s surface and left it to work for 24 hours. Next step: scraping and sanding the gel stripper and the varnish off the cabinet faces in preparation for painting.  This step is messy and time consuming: it took me about 40 minutes to prepare each individual cabinet door for painting.

Plan to spend at least a few hours scraping and sanding, depending on the size of your vanity.  Hang in there: this step is essential for getting your paint (or stain) to coat evenly and beautifully!

Cabinet Scraping & Sanding Supply List

Here’s a handy list of every tool I used to scrape and sand my wood vanity:

Paint Scraper

Paint scrapers are cheap but essential – you’ll need at least one to properly remove the stripping gel and varnish from your cabinet faces.

Handheld Corner Sander

You’ll need a “palm sander” for sanding the cabinet faces prior to painting.  I’ve tried, and do not recommend, trying to sand by hand.

Sanding Pads

The sandpaper that goes with corner sanders is special: they’re shaped like little pressing irons and the velcro backings are designed to hold them onto the sander.  I used both 80 grit pads (for varnish removal) and 220 grit pads (for lighter touchups).  You’ll need multiple pads, since they get gunked up.  I think I used 4-5 pads from the 80 grit set and 3-4 from the 220 set.

Paper Towels

You’ll need paper towels for wiping away used stripping gel and varnish.

Protect Thyself

Skipping this step is likely to leave you with debris in your eyes and lungs (which you will cough out over the next several days).  Here’s my el-cheapo solution, which has served me well for a few projects now:

• High school chemistry class goggles
• Earplugs
• Simple 3M brand dust mask

This particular style of dust mask is nice because it has two separate elastic bands, one for going over your ear and one for going under.  This lets it avoid all my cartilage piercings. :)  It pinches nicely over the nose and somehow breathing into it does not fog the goggles.

The high school chemistry style goggles are much preferred over glasses due to the nature of dust floating everywhere.

Not shown are my earplugs, which I HIGHLY recommend when working with power sanders and shop vacs.  If something’s going to damage my hearing, it better be concerts and not power tools.

It’s not 100% perfect – there’s a small gap between the facemask and the goggles, but it works 99.9% of the time and was super cheap compared to some of the more serious protective masks I’ve seen for sale.

Scraping off the Citristip

Using your handheld paint scraper, push firmly and work with the grain of the wood.  I usually go over an area at least a few times before moving on.  Remove the clumpy Citristrip/varnish/paint bits with a paper towel. It’s important to remove all of the Citristrip and varnish before moving onto sanding: if you don’t, the leftover stripping gel will just crud up your sanding pad.

Sanding

Start with rough sandpaper (I use 80 grit for this step) to sand off whatever varnish and gel still remains.  I highly recommend my Black & Decker electric “mouse” sander.

This whole process takes about 1 hour for a single door, 30-40 minutes for a drawer.  This was tedious and laborious and I split up the sanding over two real-life days.

Arms tired yet?  Part 3 demonstrates priming in preparation for painting!

We have absolutely no budget for a bathroom remodel, so I’m going into DIY mode to refinish this vanity using leftover supplies from my kitchen cabinet refinishing project. Due mostly to dry times, refinishing my master bathroom vanity was about a five day project with about 3-5 hours a day of work each day except the first (which was super quick).

In this series of posts, I’ll walk you through all the steps of refinishing a wood bathroom vanity:

1. Stripping the wood varnish (or paint, if yours is painted)
2. Sanding for a nice smooth surface
3. Priming so the enamel sticks
4. Painting a durable enamel

Let’s begin!

Empty the Bathroom

The very first step is to remove everything that isn’t related to this home improvement project.  It’s going to get extremely messy and dusty in here as we strip varnish and sand the cabinet faces.

Unless, of course, you can take your vanity or cabinet doors outside, which I couldn’t thanks to near constant rain during the week I spent refinishing this vanity.

Remove Existing Hardware

Removing the cabinet hardware (knobs and such) is also essential – painting around things is bad. Very bad.

Apply Stripping Gel

CitriStrip worked very well on my kitchen cabinet project, so I’m using it again on this one.  One bottle has been enough for both my kitchen and now this bathroom.

Since all I’m removing here in the bathroom is a thin layer of varnish, I don’t need to lay the Citristrip on too thick: just a thin but consistent layer on every wood surface ought to do it.  For this step I use a cheap plastic paint brush and a few paper towels.

I’ll come back in 24 hours to scrape and sand the peeling varnish.