Res-door-ation

One of the nice things about having acquired such a neglected house is that there are a lot of original features still intact. Elaborate cement tiles, original ceilings and solid wooden doors. We’re trying our hardest to keep them rather than replace them. As one cousin reminded us, old is gold.

Uh oh... guess what we found in the attic? Huge door. We have to use this somehow...

High crafted ceilings, wooden doors and a marble fireplace. Plenty of old gold in one room (before we stripped the wallpaper... indeed you might recognise this photo!)

One day we'll get to see these beautiful cement tiles again. Hopefully. 

Some of our recent efforts have therefore been focused on restoring doors, or res-door-ation as we shall call it from now. The house contains 14 doors (which is bizarrely 4 less than our current 1.5 bed flat, despite the house being several times the size!). So that is 14 doors to res-door. We’re currently about halfway through two of them! That said there difference is massive and it is strangely satisfying.

Some beautiful wood under all those layers of paint.

So how are we doing this? The doors are covered in layers of paint, and you may remember from an earlier post that there is a lead paint problem in the house. The doors have actually tested negative for lead paint so far, but we are treating everything as if it were lead paint to be on the safe side. So this means no dry sanding until the paint is (basically all) off. So to get there we are using this thing.

Thing 1.

It’s called a Speedheater cobra. If held a few centimetres above the paint for about 3 seconds the paint softens and can be scraped off with different shave hooks and scrubbed with a wire brush.

The total of the tools we are using. 

“So it’s a fancy heat gun (which itself is just a fancy hairdryer)” you might think. Kind of. The difference is it only (!) heats to 500 degrees, so doesn’t melt led. While heat guns go to over  1000 degrees and do.

It’s pretty effective, though incredibly fiddly to get in corners effectively.

Problem profiles after the stripping... lots of sanding to come.

After that it is down to sanding, sanding, sanding

We still have to decide whether we keep the natural wood in the end or repaint the doors. We seem to keep flip flopping. Painting (1 or 2 coats, not 10 like at present!) will look good and won’t require all those corners and nooks to be perfectly sanded. But on the other hand the natural wood is looking pretty beautiful. Some big decisions are ahead...

The windowed door type, stripped back.

Varnish or paint? What do you recommend?