I can’t even begin to express my excitement at having a door … on the bathroom. Yes, we’ve been living in a renovation with no interior doors for months—a curtain being the makeshift substitute—and watching the first door go up was nothing short of amazing. Getting it to the point that it could be installed evoked another feeling altogether. (We’ll leave it at that, shall we?)
I mentioned previously that all the salvaged doors and mouldings would need to be stripped of the stain, sealer and years of who-knows-what that accumulated on the wood. The doors and jams were, of course, par for the course at this point, eating through five times as much remover and slowing the process because they needed to be stripped of hardware and had far more nooks and crannies needing scrubbed. Several hundred rags and brushes later (or so it seemed to me—I even lost a few handy-dandy, well-worn brooms to the endeavor—don’t judge: desperate times call for desperate measures), they were ready to be painted. Cue the sprayer!
Using a sprayer to paint the doors made up a lot of time lost on the stripping process, but it, too, had its pitfalls—mostly relating to crazy dogs that liked to stick their noses and dirty paws in the fresh paint. Ugh! Still, I highly recommend the sprayer to hand brushing. You get a much smoother finish in less than half the time, minus the occasional nose and paw prints, of course.
When it came time to hang the doors, some required a little sanding or even shaving on some ends to fit properly. Although we used the original doors and frames, getting them in so the sides were plumb meant they didn’t fit quite the same as the less-than-plumb-or-level portions of the original house. We also replaced the hinges, discovering that despite our efforts to match the sizes, the old ones were just slightly thicker. Translation: We had to shim between the doors and the hinge plates to account for the slight loss of thickness, but this isn’t visible now that the doors are in place.
Next on my list is cleaning the old hardware saved from the doors and install it—imagine it with me for a moment: doors, with handles, in a house. Simply amazing.
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