A Dippy Story

It was a cool October morning when we arrived in the sleepy courtyard of a very old house in Limassol. The garden was overgrown and the whole building was in disrepair. I was there to put a new roof on the line of outbuildings stretching the twenty meters to the wall at the bottom of the garden. Although the old walls were made of mud bricks they were still quite sturdy. Constructing the new roof was a fairly straightforward job despite the age of the house. The work progressed over the days and I worked with the various different tradesmen involved on the project including the main contractor.

One day he came to me and said “the architect wants all the doors, windows and shutters completely stripped of paint”. I replied jokingly, “that is going to take you a while with a blow torch and a scraper”. He asked me if I knew anyone who stripped doors by dipping them. I said well you have been in Cyprus longer than me, I don’t know anyone, don’t you?

That evening as I drove back to Larnaca it occurred to me that if there was nobody on the island that had seen this opportunity it was just waiting to be done. When I arrived home I talked it over with my wife and then made some calls back to England, as it was an established business there for many years.

By December a 3 meter by 2:5 meter tank was built and housed in a storage area at the back of the workshop and the system to hold the doors or shutters in the tank was devised, very simple but very effective. The tank was filled with seven tons of water and special chemicals as we had been advised by our friends back in the U.K. and from there we began to learn.

That was in 1995 and our expertise as the only commercial stripping service in Cyprus has gone from strength to strength. We use the term “commercial” because our capacity and ability to strip large numbers of items quickly and effectively is beyond compare to any other operation in Cyprus. 

We provide a valuable service to householders or business’s and is totally unique being a dedicated paint stripping service, we do nothing else! Those first doors and shutters from the old house were to be the start of a long line of items to be treated by Dip and Strip.

As our trading name implies this process involves immersing the items to be stripped in the special solution contained in the tank. After a while the items are removed and gently washed with water to remove the softened paint, stain or varnish. Doors or shutters usually need about three days to dry out and can safely be refinished after five days even through the winter months. Furniture however can take a little longer to dry out because it can have enclosed areas like drawers which does not allow air drying to be as quick. The wood must be allowed to dry naturally by evaporation, any attempt to encourage this by artificial means can lead to the wood distorting in some way, direct sunlight should also be avoided.

The process is very effective where there are intricate carvings or mouldings on a piece of furniture as old finishes are simply and gently rinsed away. There is the obvious difficulty in trying to prepare for painting the horizontal slats on shutters, an almost impossible task to execute thoroughly without even contemplating a complete removal of all the old finish.

Many customers call on dip and strip after they have attempted to remove the finish with  ordinary paint remover themselves. Even a huge amount of labour and time could not achieve the same result as Dip and Strip.

Over the years our clients have brought just about every item of furniture you can imagine to be stripped. Unfortunately our process has limitations just like any other. It takes a trained eye to know what a piece of furniture is made of. In some cases we are presented with items that we will not attempt to strip. The reason for this is that the solution in the tank is made up mainly of water. modern furniture very often contains some man made materials such as chipboard or medium density fibreboard (MDF) and these are very easily damaged by exposure to water. Your favourite bookshelf or cupboard may look like solid wood but manufacturers realised many years ago that veneered chipboard and MDF were a lot cheaper and quicker to use and they became adept at disguising its true content.

Our only other limitation is a particular type of paint, which we cannot dissolve, used in modern refinishing and is particularly difficult to detect. They are known as synthetic, plastic or two pack paints and utilise a chemical reaction to the finish dry quickly, again favoured by modern manufacturing processes.

In the five years Dip and Strip has been operating we have removed old paint of many layers, cracked and flaking varnish, sun bleached stain from over 1,000 shutters. Our results with these items has improved to the point where we GUARANTEE to remove 100% of the old finish, if the customer is not completely satisfied with the result then we do not ask to be paid. This only occurred once.

Shutters are mainly made from Pine, some that are fifty years or more are of Cyprus Pine, an excellent and durable timber, and others are made from Swedish Pine of good quality. However we have stripped shutters made from Iroko, Meranti, Brazilian Oak and Sapele. Knowing how to handle these particular timbers is very important to achieve the correct results that will not adversely affect the shutters in the long term. This accumulated knowledge would be hard to find elsewhere and we now put this at the disposal of our future clients.

Dip and Strip also remove the old finish from all kinds of solid wood furniture. Consolas that were crafted over 100 years ago, many old village tables and chairs, chests of drawers and giant wardrobes. There are occasions when it is not appropriate to dip a piece of furniture, our experience enables us to determine if we are going to improve that piece or not. Most of our clients are bringing their own personal items to be stripped but we do have a few antiques and furniture dealers who use Dip and Strip on a regular basis. We have even achieved good results with some metal items such as wrought iron four poster beds that have been painted many times plus numerous garden chairs etc. As mentioned earlier the process does have limitations but we always try our best to give a complete service and help our clients wherever possible.

Part of the Dip and Strip service is our pick up and delivery policy. We will collect your items for stripping from anywhere in Cyprus completely free of charge, and we mean anywhere (except the north of course). From the far side of Polis to Paralimni, from Troodos to Kokkinos , we have been there and have happy clients in every corner of the island, we are simply a phone call away.

Looking after our customers needs now and in the future is important enough for us to constantly scrutinise the methods employed and to see if we can improve upon it. One example of this is the ‘wood preservative dip’ for exterior woodwork that we introduced as an additional service.  When the shutters or doors have been dipped and cleaned the moisture content of the wood must then fall below 18%, before they can be put in the wood preservative. We built a special tank only wide enough to take a shutter or door. They are then placed in the tank which is almost full of a clear spirit based wood preservative. The fact that each item is immersed in the preservative allows it to penetrate every crevice of the woodwork including the end grain, the place where all shutters start to rot first. When the wood has had this treatment it is then ready for repainting.  

The depth of knowledge and experience we have puts us in a very good position to advise clients on what kind of finish to use after stripping. We take no active part in this and gain nothing from our advice and as such is completely unbiased, we have seen so many examples of what stays on the wood and what does not given the climatic conditions here in Cyprus.

Dip and Strip is currently involved in one of it’s largest projects to date. Larnaca has  large number of old Municipal buildings and those located near the sea front are currently under going a complete renovation. We were asked to strip all the shutters on a complex of buildings and this is being done in May 2000. It is hoped that in the future Dip and Strip will be assisting many other renovations to a fine finish.