Best Paint Strippers for Removing Paint from Old Home

LESLIE: Kelly in Mississippi is on the line and needs some help removing paint from old home. What can we do for you?

KELLY: I have a 100-year-old home. The walls of the house are brick. The eaves are wood. And over the years, the eaves have been painted and it’s just blistered paint, peeling paint and probably three or four layers of paint.

TOM: OK.

KELLY: I want to know the best way to remove that paint and redo it.

TOM: Yeah. Well, you’ve got to strip the paint and it’s a big job. There are different types of chemical strippers that are available for removing paint from old home. There are some natural – they’re called “orange-peel” – strippers that are showing promise, where you apply the stripper, you cover it with a plastic and then you leave it for some period of time – a couple of hours – and it seems to speed up the stripping process. But if you’ve got that much paint on it, you’re going to need to strip off what you can.

And then, once you’re done with that, Kelly, you do need to prime it because that’s going to give you a good, solid surface upon which the next coats will stick very well. I would be concerned that if you just stripped off the old paint, tried to put another topcoat on there, you wouldn’t have the adhesion. Because the primer is kind of the glue that makes that paint stick, OK?

KELLY: What’s the product that you would recommend to remove that paint?

TOM: There’s a product at Home Depot called Citristrip that works very well.

KELLY: OK.

TOM: It’s a stripping gel. And it’s safer to use than the traditional paint strippers for removing paint from old home. And then there’s another one that’s called Klean-Strip that also works very well.

So I would take a look at those two products. And what I would do is maybe buy a gallon of each and give them each a try. You know, sometimes the formulation of the paint, depending on how it was made and how old it is, impacts which stripper works the best.

KELLY: Right.

TOM: So I would buy a small quantity, test it out, see which works best and go from there.

KELLY: OK. Sounds great.