Before and After: Door

One of the many small projects I've been working on is the laundry room door. This is upstairs, just off the kitchen, and leads to the outside stairs (which are now gone). Like everything else in this little laundry room, the door was ragged and nasty.

It has some panels of colored glass in it, which is nice, but the window putty was falling out and the wind whistled around some of the glass panes. The woodwork was in bad shape, too. In particular, the lower left panel was missing entirely and had been boarded up with a sheet of plywood. You can see it here in the "before" picture.

I took out each of the nine glass panels, scraped off all the old putty, cleaned the glass, put them back in, put in new glazier's points and replaced all the putty. This took a lot longer than I expected; puttying takes a long time!

Then I fabricated a new wooden panel out of MDF. Since the original panel used tongue-and-groove, there was no way to insert a new panel without taking the entire door apart. It's kind of like one of those 15-square puzzles. So I made the panel out of eight interlocking pieces (four inside and four outside) so that it fit snugly into the opening and was the same thickness as the originals. Then I glued the raised piece into the middle after routing and beveling it to match the others. A little bead of caulk softened the edges enough that the center piece looks like part of the main panel and not glued on.

I also took off the brass doorknobs and hardware and stripped the paint off everything. This plate was completely white before; it had been painted over--many times--and was nearly invisible against the white door. A little stripping, scraping, and polishing and now they look pretty good.

Some of the smaller wood trim pieces have small details that 20-odd layers of paint had obscured. I stripped these as best I could, with multiple applications of eco-friendly wood stripper, but in the end I resorted to scraping with a screwdriver and pick. I got most of the old paint out, but not all.

Now I've glued, nailed, and puttied everything back together and slapped on a bit of primer. Here's the almost-finished door, with the new panel on the left and the original on the right. Not bad, huh?

I'll wait for the putty to set before I paint the top half of the door. I don't want to disturb the glass while I scrape away paint splatters. Besides, it gives me an excuse to take some time off from the door.