Second Door

Noel spent a bunch of time cleaning the old paint off the door for the understair bathroom. I thought I'd show you some of the process of stripping it.

This is what the waxed paper looks like when you pull it up after letting the Peel-Away sit for 24 hours. In an ideal world, the waxed paper covering would just pull all the old paint with it, but the reality is that things like primer rarely come up so cleanly.

But the stripper does soften the paint, so a good scraping worked pretty well to remove most of the paint.

For trickier pieces like carved moldings, a wire brush works nicely.

After stripping the whole door, Noel sanded it and patched the wood where some towel hooks and the door handle were, plus a few bonus dings.

Then he primed it. For some reason this door has a funky old-cigarette smell to it, so priming helped lock that smell away. When we decide on what shade of white to paint it, we can do the topcoats.

With the door primed, Noel and Rosie were able to install the pocket door hardware.

This was much faster the second time around.

Then we hung the door. And now it really feels like a room.

posted by ayse on 07/21/14