door

A couple of days ago I sanded Ginger’s door down to get it ready for stain. Like all the upstairs doors, we had taken it to get dipped & stripped (probably over a year ago!), but unfortunately, the work never ends there. I hadn’t really looked at them too closely after getting them back from the strippers, but while sanding them, I noticed that the strippers had been a little to aggressive with their scrapers. One side of the door had really rough-sawn panels, and apparently the texture wasn’t willing to let go of the paint, forcing the strippers to scrape and gouge the panels to get the paint off. Because these gouges cut pretty deep, I decided to sand all of the panels smooth in order to remove the grooves. On the plus side, we now have nice, smooth panels on both sides of the door, but the negative was the hours I had to spend to sand just one door. Even with a power sander, it took forever to sand enough off to make the gouges less visible. They didn’t come out perfectly, but the great thing about old doors with beautiful grain is that the remaining blemishes actually add more character to the door. At least that’s what I tell myself, so that I can stop sanding. Comparing it to the way it looked when we bought the house, it was worth all the time and expense.

Ginger’s room is coming along nicely. The most difficult part, not surprisingly, was the closet doors. We always find that any of the “adapted” house parts that we get from salvage yards (in this case, the Rebuilding Center) end up taking the lion’s share of the labor time. The story here was that we needed doors just a bit shorter than 5′ for the closets, and new fir doors were quoted out in the neighborhood of $800…each! We got these, which are actually some sort of old cabinet doors for $30 or $40. Total cost after having the lead paint stripped off was maybe $150. The downside is that I had to fabricate jambs for them, since they had none. This is the type of project for which I have little patience, skill or interest. But the cost difference is pretty compelling, and of course, we always like to be able to reuse something old in our house whenever possible. Today also saw the new windows go in, so by tomorrow all the trim in the room and closets should be finished as well. Also, I got another coat of mud on the stairwell, but it doesn’t look different enough to warrant a new picture.

This weekend saw another closet door hung, as well as more trim in Chloe’s room. I basically just worked until I ran out of wood, which didn’t take too long. Got to pick up more MDF this week.  As often happens, I realized that my “vision” was limited when I created the closet openings.  If I had just put them a few inches over, I wouldn’t have had to do all the funky cuts in the trim.  On the other hand, I think they look kind of cool with the notches for the rafters in them.

A few weeks ago we got our doors and jambs back from Houck’s Stripping.  Actually, he had been bugging me for awhile, but I was trying to defer picking them up until we were ready for them.  As usual with remodeling projects, it became clear that the timing wouldn’t work out, so I just picked them up and jammed them in the garage.  Our garage has looks more like the Rebuilding Center or the basement at Hippo Hardware than a garage, since it is packed full of wood, windows, a pink toilet and other materials that came out of our house.   In fact, since we’ve never actually parked a car into either of its two stalls, I’m afraid that it probably feels very emasculated. Click to continue »

One of the areas where we splurged was on the Simpson basement and closet doors. They make a fantastic five-paneled door that is an exact match to our existing doors in the rest of the house. More than just about anything we did, these add to the authentic feel of our remodel.

You can also see that much of the rewiring is done in this picture.

Yet another place where we spent much more than we wanted to, but where it was worth it in the end.

We had originally planned to put in french doors, since we really preferred them to sliding patio doors. But once we really started thinking about how we would be using the doors, we realized that a sliding door would make more sense. Having a screen that you can slide into place is nice to have in the summertime, even though we really don’t get all that many insects here. In the end, we found these Marvin doors that were fiberglass outside and fir on the inside (“Woodclad”). Since we’d be able to stain them to match the rest of our fir trim, we thought that they would look fine in the kitchen. And they really do. We have had several people comment about how they didn’t think they liked sliding patio doors, but they really loved these.