done a lot of door sanding and finishing lately. this is the door between the hallway of the downstairs unit and the hallway that leads to the upper unit. i’ve developed some techniques that makes it go faster. first we strip off the paint from all flat surfaces. on the first pass, i just work to get as much of the paint off as quickly as i can. janeen is really good at getting paint off the intricate areas of molding.
after getting all the paint off, then we do a second pass to clean up the edges and corners, and missed paint. it works much better to do two passes, because if the paint gets too hot, it melts and smears into the wood.
Then sanding. sanding the flat areas is really fast. the intricate bits are really, really slow though. i’ve added a piece of wood at the bottom of the door. it still needs trimming and filling in the photo below.
i guess the old door hardware did not work very well, so they installed modern hardware. To do that, they drilled out a large hole in the door where the hardware attaches. i’m trying to go back to traditional hardware, so i’ve filled most of the hole that was cut out of the door. The remaining part will be covered by a brass cover plate.
janeen couldn’t resist doing more paint scraping in the downstairs bedroom (below left). we also primed the wainscote in the downstairs bathroom.
i made the top for janeen’s standing desk. got a bit fancy with the edge of the desk, using a 1/8″ thick strip of redwood as an accent. it would look better if the edging were maple (like the veneer on the plywood.) the accent strip would hide the join and look decorative. but i had left over oak from doing the floors, so used that. now it’s an amalgam of woods!
photo above right: almost all my clamps were needed to clamp on the edging while the glue dried. the desk isn’t finished: i still need to make draws. below: the desk in its temporary home, until we get the office done.
