Refinishing solid hardwood doors is very labor intensive but the rewards are great. A lot of our clients are trying to maintain the integrity and original look of their, normally, older homes. Would it be easier to just by a new door? Absolutely. But they just don’t make them the way that they used to.  And, oftentimes, it’s less expensive to refinish than to completely replace.

If you want to keep the look, feel and originality of your older home, refinishing your interior solid wood doors is a good option.

Strip the Old Coatings

As you can see in the picture below, the door also has a custom, built-in mirror. Safely removing that was very important. This is a tricky step because there is a possibility that the mirror could crack. It’s custom and it’s 90 years old. We don’t know how it’s adhered to the door, other than the moulding, until we start to remove it.  But, we were able to get it off unscathed.

Like most of the doors that we refinish, this door was painted. Painted A LOT. The doors are original to this 90 year old home so there were several layers of paint on the door.

Carefully removing all of the layers of paint is the first step. The client chose to stain the door so it was decided to also replace the moulding around the door. It is much less expensive and more effective to simply replace the moulding than to strip it.

Sand Down the Door

After all of the paint is removed, stain prep is the next, vital step. It is extremely important to sand the door progressively using finer and finer sand paper. This ensures a clean, smooth finish. Plus, it ensures proper penetration of the stain or stain gel.

Apply the Stain and Finish

The final step is to apply the stain and clear polyurethane top coat. Because the door had so many coats of paint, a stain gel was chosen for best coverage. Stain gel maintains the look of stain but aids in covering some deeply penetrated paint that can’t be removed. We then carefully replaced the mirror. The moulding that holds the mirror in place had to be replaced so we found a moulding that was very close to the original. After cleaning up the original hardware, we installed the finished moulding. Beautiful!!

Get in touch to discuss having us restore you solid hardwood doors.

216-245-1236