Sunday, August 14, 2011

Another Unplanned DIY Project

Sharon has a real knack of turning a fairly short repair project into a full-day of stripping paint! The painters are supposed to start the exterior of the house this week and so this was our last chance to make changes before the paint.

We had this paint-encrusted side door that needed some TLC. Originally, we were just planning to fix the glass. The prior owner had put in a piece of glass that was too small for the opening and filled the gap with a piece of wood. Ingenious, yes; attractive, not really.

Thanks to our dining room window saga, we actually had a spare sheet of glass kicking around and it happened to be big enough, so we decided to try our hand at replacing the glass.

But once we had the door down to remove the glass, Sharon noticed the hardware was paint-encrusted too. It didn't look like the backplate had ever been removed for painting. So, she decided it would be lovely to clean that up as well. And then once we had the hardware off, we could see the lovely old growth fir underneath...

As usual, Jeff was the heat gun guy. He stripped both sides of the door. Then Sharon followed behind him with the chemical stripper. She only cleaned up the interior side of the door to get it back to stain grade. The exterior we are simply going to repaint but now it should look better with fewer layers of paint.

Sharon also sanded the interior side to remove the worst of the gouges and dog scratches.Here is the backside of the door; the side that is going to be repainted. We didn't feel the need to completely strip the paint out of the wood grain. (The dark spot on the lower left is just a wet spot. It will dry and go away.)The glass is cut and in. But our glazing compound we bought in June for the windows is already unusable. We need to go buy another small container to finish this project.

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