pocket doors redux

We've been working on these doors for months. They still aren't done. But, in a fit of realism, we decided that we needed to shift our priorities a bit. Finishing the antique doors we're retrofitting into pocket doors from the dining room into the office isn't the most urgent thing on our plate. Right now it's far more important that we get the stairwell banister refinished and rehung, so that the people who come to our house are safe and so that we can have overnight guests. So we elected to get the doors out of our work space (i.e. the guest room) and store them out of the way until we can get back to them to finally sand and paint them.

And where better to store them than in the 'pockets' they are intended for?


Yes, we hung the doors! Aren't they fantastic? They're really old, and really heavy, but we got hardware rated for doors even heavier, so it all works incredibly smoothly. Just imagine that the glass is clean and they're painted white!

doors, continued

The door refinishing operations have been moved from under a tent in the backyard into the now-painted guest room, as the weather here in Baltimore has been horrifically humid for the last week or two - not the best conditions to leave untreated wood out in.


Once we scraped off all of the paint stripper and let everything dry out for a day or two, we borrowed a couple of power sanders from my father-in-law and Don went to work on the doors. At this writing, he has finished the first sanding, with 80-grit sandpaper, on the wide areas of the doors. The beveled edges of the inside molding are going to have to be done by hand - I think the best we can hope for is to take the top layer of varnish off and rough them up enough that primer and paint will stick well.


I think when we're done these doors will be beautiful, but they are a lot more work than I anticipated! I shudder to think that we still have to strip and refinish the stairway banister, as well as the (fortunately plainer) doors for all of the upstairs rooms.

refinishing

One of the 'small' projects I'm really excited about is finally refinishing all of our doors. When we gutted the house, we saved all of the original doors and put them in storage (okay, our garage) until we were ready to start finishing the house. When we cleared out the attic, we were excited to find two more doors up there, that Don's dad told us had been original to the house but removed during one of the family's extensive renovations. They were french doors, solid wood with squares of beveled glass inset. They were painted a hideous shade of teal, but seemed to be in good condition.

The discovery of these doors actually changed our structural plan mid-construction. We had originally planned for the transition from the dining room to the office to simply be a large opening, like the one that goes from dining room to living room. When we found the doors, though, we decided instead to install them as pocket doors dividing the dining room from the office. A header and doorframe had to be built where there had been nothing before. Fortunately nobody grumbled too much.

So now here we are, with a mostly finished house, and it's finally door time! We decided to start with the office doors, both because they're the most complicated and because we'd like to get the main level finished as fast as we can, since it's more 'public' space.

We set up a tent in the backyard, got some sawhorses, and got to work.


The citrus-based nontoxic stripper we used worked wonders! Hardly a hint of the teal remains - or the other three shades we discovered under it. Next up we'll sand the doors down with increasingly fine grits of sandpaper (80, 100, and finally 120) and then prime and paint them to match the rest of the trim in the house. They'll also have to get squared up and have pocket door hardware installed - but after all that effort they are going to look amazing!