Doors

As there's another ten days before the plasterer comes, I thought I may as well make a start on the door. The doors in this house are original, and therefore around a hundred years old, but the previous owners, who had a liking for natural rather than painted wood, dipped and stripped them.

We have seven interior doors in total that look something like this. Now I'm not exactly averse to a bit of natural wood myself. Trouble is being so old, these doors have been banged about a bit. Cracks here, knocks there, bits of the moulding missing, joints gaping. On top of that, the stripping isn't exactly first class. Chunks of old filler remain, giving the doors a neglected look, and as if all that wasn't bad enough it's not a totally natural finish the last owners went for. No, they preferred to add an unusual blue stain to everything. It doesn't look blue when it's on. I only know it's blue because I found the tin. To look at, once applied, you'd simply think the doors are dirty.

So we've been putting up with these dirty doors for over a year and a half. Even the new bathroom and the new study retained their old doors (well, the study door is still propped up against the wall on the landing - I never refitted it after the carpet went down). The idea was that refurbishing/painting the doors was a project in its own right, but so far that's meant none of them are finished. I didn't want to make that mistake again plus, like I said, I have time to kill in the middle of this project, so...

The problems with the doors range from large splits, through small cracks, to dings and holes. Here are some examples:







The plan is to pin the worst splits (none of the problems will involve any advanced joinery skills!), fill the cracks, sand down and give the doors a couple of coats of undercoat to cover the minor blemishes, followed by a couple of coats of satin finish gloss. I bought some cheap replacement handles yesterday too. Sadly the original Edwardian ones are too badly dinged and messed up to keep. These cheapo brass ones will see us through until we see something we really like.

So after filling the cracks in one side, flipping the door over, pinning the split, filling, sanding an applying one coat of undercoat, the door looks like this. Already a huge improvement on how it looked before, and there's a way to go yet.