Our Edwardian Door Restoration

With so many doors around our house in a complete state of disrepair, it was inevitable that we’d be sharing a door makeover with you sooner or later.

Our living room has already come a long way since first moving into our house. But, as with all of our other rooms, there is still a lot of work to do.

The door is just one of the things on our long project To-Do list. This is what it’s like at the moment.

It really looks out of place with our newly plastered and painted walls and sanded floorboards. It feels like the whole room is let down by the door. It really makes it feel unfinished and very much like a building site.

Now, after a few hours of stripping and sanding, this is what it looks like.

Not a great improvement is it? As with the staircase, we used a heat gun to strip the paint. There is only one layer of paint on the door, so it’s proving quite easy to strip, the door frame though is another matter.

There are so many layers of paint on it that it’s taking forever. The detail on the frame and door isn’t helping matters, either. There are so many curves and corners! As usual, sanding is taking much longer than expected.

After a few more hours of sanding, it’s time to paint the door. Don’t forget to prime the knots with a knotting solution! If you skip this step, the knots will eventually shine through the new paintwork. Annoyingly, we missed one or two when restoring our bathroom door. You can see them here.

When painting a panelled door, you should start by painting the beading and then the panels.

Then you can start to paint the rest of the door. Start with the horizontal areas and finish with the vertical ones. This way you should avoid brush marks. Remember to also finish on an upward brushstroke, as this will also minimise any brush marks.

Let the paint completely dry and then sand the whole area with very fine sandpaper. We usually use 240 grit paper to do this.

Using the same method as for the door, we stripped, sanded and painted the frame, too. As usual, everything took longer than expected, but lucky for you, there’s no need to wait to see the result as here it is

It makes such a huge difference to the whole feel of the room.

The corner of the room seems so much brighter and the room now definitely has that finished feel. As usual here are our before and after pictures.

We’re so happy to have finally restored the living room door and more importantly it was the last bit of building work that the room needed!

Of course, we still need some more furniture and just general finishing touches, but the room itself is finished! Still can’t quite get over it!

What do you think of our finished door? We are painting all of the woodwork in our house white, but do you think that we should have left the doors in the natural wood finish?