My First Door

I decided that today was the day that I was going to start working on restoring the original doors that are in our house...the few that have not been replaced with hollow core doors, that is. My poor husband has a busy work week scheduled, with some really long days, so I wanted to find a project that I could work on with minimal assistance.

Currently, we have four original doors - three closet and one pantry. I thought that the best door to start with would be the door to the closet in the master bedroom.

I put some bubble wrap on top of the two sawhorses my wonderful husband built for me over Thanksgiving weekend. One of the many home renovation blogs I read recommended doing this to keep from scratching the other side. Once I set it up, I started working on removing the door knobs, back plate, and innards. I put the small screws in a sandwich ziplock bag, and put that bag and the door hardware into a larger freezer ziplock bag. Hopefully, this will keep them safe and together until I can clean them up.

I just love these door knobs. I have no idea if they are original to the house or not. I have read on some sites that the glass knobs were popular in the 1920s, but what makes me suspicious is how bright and brassy the backside of the knob is. I haven't decided yet what to do about them, especially since I love the "bling" for the door!

I don't know what the interior part of the door knob is called that holds the knob and they keyhole, but it sure was tight...really tight. I struggled quite a bit to get it to slide out of the door. But I eventually got it, as you can see.

Scraping the paint off the door has been a lot easier than I anticipated. Apparently, these have only been painted once or twice. And whomever decided to paint it initially never bothered to remove the original finish. This means that the heat gun bubbles it up and the scraper takes it right off. No elbow grease required. The only real challenge is in the framing of the panels. These are very narrow and curved, as you can see in the panel on the right. However, I found a method that appears to be working quite well...

I found that if I heat the paint up with the heat gun just enough to make it warm, I can pull it off with my fingers. It comes off in really long strips. The trick is to get it soft enough to remove but no so hot as to burn my fingertips!

So far, the door is absolutely beautiful with a warm, red sheen to it and some grain. I am planning on following another blogger's process of removing the paint with a heat gun, then removing the original finish and paint remnants with stripper and steel wool. Then sand it three times and seal the whole thing with shellack. It will be my first time using shellack, but the results I have seen on other sites makes me really want to test it out. I will be sure to keep you posted, but for now, back to scraping!