The shelf was covered in a dull brown paint and was in pretty beat-up condition. As I was cleaning it up, I noticed raised nails and some weird kind of staples. The former were easy enough to pound in but the latter required a lot of careful filing. There's a lot of ways to join wood, I recommend choosing anything other than protruding metal.
I started stripping with a random orbit sander and then switched to the belt sander as the brown paint was very thick and strong. The shelf unit wasn't assembled very well and there were a lot of uneven surfaces and protruding points. It broke a belt on the belt sander and started shredding a disk on the random orbit sander. Nice. What I should have done was primed over the brown paint, added a top coat of white, spot sanded and stained the whole thing. That would have given me an antiqued look with a nice patina of brown, stained white and stained bare wood.
Alas, I was committed and decided to bring out the heavy artillery. Chemical stripper is great for uneven surfaces but is a real mess to work with. The stripper took off 90% of the brown paint, leaving a couple standing blotches and a brown color to the wood. Spot sanding took care of both of these issues.
After all the difficulty with the outer surfaces, I figured there was no way I was going to get the brown paint off the inside. I did a quick sanding to rough things up, put on a layer of primer and finished with a new coat of brown paint. The outside was stained and is drying overnight. Tomorrow, I'll decide if it needs a second coat and start with the polyurethane.
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