I want to repaint/varnish a piece of furniture, but have no idea if I can use a similar paint color, or if I need to find the exact type of varnish used. Is there a big difference in varnish vs paint?
Wood – How to repaint an antique piece of furniture that was varnished
hardwood-refinishingvarnishing
Related Solutions
While a heat gun can remove a large amount of paint, there will always be some residue that needs to be removed with scrapers and sanding. Scraping can mar and gouge wood (less an issue when you can fill and paint) and sanding in tight crevasses in molding is hard.
There are commercial scrapers available, but they don't always fit your needs. On important projects, I have made scrapers out of large nails with their heads ground down to a sharp edge for tight curves and grooves, and pieces of curved cut glass for shallow curves (I'm a glass worker, so handling this risky stuff is comfortable to me, but not necessarily easy).
Sanding is tedious and, with old lead paint (yours looks old enough to be that), risky. You need masks and goggles.
You also may want to consider chemical strippers. There are newer citrus based versions that are a lot less caustic and foul smelling than the traditional solvent based ones. Even so, these will also need some scraping and sanding before finishing.
The wood had better be pretty good to warrant this care. If not either removal and replacement, or build up of new facing molding seems the better course.
I would use Oxalic acid (in deck "brightners") before using bleach. Bleach not only breaks down color, but accelerates wood deterioration.
Be sure to neutralize as directed; with borax diluted in water or bicarbonate of soda in water.
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Best Answer
You can paint over varnish, but you will need to thoroughly sand and degloss the existing finish first.
I use medium grit sandpaper followed by fine, then wipe with solvent to remove all dust, dirt etc., then paint with high quality oil-based paint using the very best paint brush I can afford. Just finished some old varnished cabinets and they look great now, mirror smooth like glass.