When you crest the top of the stairs in our house, you are greeted by a relatively small landing and a sea of off-white: white walls, white trim, and white doors (five to be exact). It’s not the most exciting or inviting. On top of the lackluster monotony, the painting was clearly not expertly done. It is bubbly, is full of cracks, and peels off in thin rubbery sheets.
Not being sure how we could remedy the trim yet, we decided to focus on the doors first. We could paint over them and fix the color issue, but the paint wasn’t in good enough condition to even attempt that with any hope of improvement. Stripping the paint off seemed like the best option.
- Cleaning up the hardware while we're at it -
We decided to start on the bathroom door. Mostly because the hooks screwed onto it were rusty and staining our towels and when we removed the hooks, we saw that the hooks were not removed the last time the door was painted. This had to be addressed at some point, so why not now?
It was hard to tell what sort of condition the actual door was in because it was masked by layers and layers of paint, but we were hopeful. We figured with stripping the paint, at least we could get to a workable, even surface to repaint or stain (if we got lucky enough).
Having never attempted anything like this before, we read up on a few different methods and products. We started off using the stripping chemicals where you cover the surface with said chemicals, wait the prescribed amount of time, and scrape off with a plastic paint scraper or putty knife.
This method was working, but wasn’t our favorite for a couple of reasons.
It required multiple applications on each area to get through all the layers of paint.
It scraped off nicely, but you were left with gooey gummy paint sludge on the end of your scraper and I had a hard time keeping it clean.
Probably due to the multiple applications, but we were going through a lot more of the chemicals than we had anticipated.
We decided it was time to try something else. What could it hurt? A heat gun and a metal paint scraper or putty knife had been suggested to us. I was skeptical, but it worked like a dream. Well maybe not a dream exactly, but way better than I hoped for. We just used the heat gun to heat up the paint in front of the scraper until you could slide it forward with little resistance (usually you could start to see a bubble forming here or there).
The heat gun worked pretty well for the majority of the door but got a little trickier in the more detailed areas (as I’m assuming would be true for most methods of paint removal). We used two different widths of scrapers: a wider one for that flat areas and a narrower one (1.5” I think) for the more detailed areas.
Final paint removal and preparation of the door was done by sanding. I was so excited to see that the door was actually in really good condition, especially considering its age. It looked like we were going to be able to stain it after all!
We chose a gel stain in a dark walnut color. The gel stain was really easy to work with and allowed for an even application without the fear of accidental drips. The dark walnut color had a nice lightly aged feel about it. It came out not looking too warm and orangey or too cool and ashy. I was really pleased.
To top it off (quite literally), two coats of varnish were applied to each side. The door was ready to hang!
A bit of time was involved, but I’m so happy with how the first door turned out. Definitely worth it. Only four more to go.
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