If you are restoring the doors, windows and woodwork in an old house, or are adding a new front door or other architectural item, and want to feature the wood grain, you need a good looking wood finish. We can help you with that.
Most of the old homes being restored have doors made from hardwoods like mahogany or oak or from old growth fir or redwood (in California). Although they were almost universally painted due to sun exposure, if they don't require too much repair they can look very striking in a wood tone finish. When customers have chosen that option instead of paint, we have never known them to be disappointed.
For exterior doors, whether used or new replacements, the key issue is durability in sun and weather. The cutting edge finish used on most factory made exterior doors right now is a two part solvent based polyurethane finish. We have found a manufacturer who has formulated a water based coating which exceeds even these in durability and resistance to UV rays. While we offer no guarantee on any finish we apply for exterior use, we believe the finish we use offers the maximum possible life for a modern water based finish. The doors pictured to the right were coated with this finish. Of course, when preferred, we can spray an exterior paint on doors as well.
If your need is windows or other household woodwork, including interior doors, we can certainly help with that as well. Whatever your needs are for the finishing of household doors, windows or woodwork, we can help.
Our focus on this page is mainly doors, but we do want to illustrate that other household woodwork is very much within our scope of work. The four segments below are all for one stair hand rail from an older home which was being restored.
These doors were painted white when they came to us. This customer wanted a natural wood appearance instead. We advise our customers that although at least 99% of the paint will be gone after stripping, there will likely remain some paint in corners and recesses. There did end up being a tiny remnant of paint in places. One could painstakingly spend hours removing the last traces of paint. We think there are very acceptable and less costly alternatives.
Doesn't this door look good with the slightly darkened recesses? It looks like natural shading. We glazed all the recesses to both cover the paint and add this feature. Very effective and much less expensive than stressing about whether we had removed the last micron of paint.
This is fairly self explanatory, painted blue when it came in, stripped of the paint in the middle, and then beautifully refinished on the right. However, what isn't so obvious, is the blue dye remaining in the end grain which is slightly visible in the outside recesses of the center panels of the stripped door. The blue paint must have been formulated with some blue dye in the color formula. Dyes will penetrate wood fibers and permanently color them. In this case the effect is not overwhelming, the medium brown color chosen easily masks the blue. In addition, this customer also chose to have us highlight the three panels. Any lingering influence of the blue dye would be completely obscured by the effect of the highlighting glaze.
Here is another fairly obvious photo series. Not really. This time we have added some additional photos below to show what is not obvious in this sequence. Before you scroll down to see the additional photos, we want to point out that this door was highlighted also–not to cover paint, but because it looks so good when the highlighting is done. The animal scratches at the bottom were intentionally left untouched as "features."
The photo above left displays the effects of shrinkage: gaps between sections and the little pieces of quarter round glued over the open gaps between the center panel and the frame. The entire door needed to be taken apart and reglued with a waterproof adhesive. Most of the four insert panels also had splits in the seams at one end or the other which needed to be glued. The one light section of wood had been sanded to reveal the natural color of the wood.
Here the door has been completely reglued, without retaining any of the now unnecessary quarter round cover ups. It has also been sanded to remover the grey, weathered outer layer and is ready for finishing.
It is always nice to know when your tax dollars are being well spent. Our opinion is that using a small business for services needed by the state is dollars well spent, especially when we are the service provider! These doors were rebuilt and re-screened then painted elsewhere. Unfortunately, the paint job didn't turn out well and the color selection wasn't quite right. The doors had to be stripped and repainted. That is when we were included in the project.
The door on the left is a standard 80" height door! We wonder, are old governors really tall enough to need doors like these? These are the way they came to us. Our first step was to remove the paint.
On this website we haven't featured how sloppy and gross stripping paint is, so here is a sample. We intentionally chose a mild looking photo. This is one of the charcoal colored doors.
Paint gone!
The screens are not to be painted so they were masked before the painting began. A very important step!
Doors newly painted and awaiting pick up. Everyone was happy this time!
Looks like we have a corner left to show you one more door. This door was a brand new alder door this customer wanted professionally finished. We got the job and you get to see how it turned out. Our customer was very happy, we were happy, and we hope you like what you see as well!
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