Door

Back in April, I went back to another leftover from the bathroom, which was the heavily (and multiply) painted bathroom door. To match the dark wood motif inside the bathroom, the plan was to restore the door to what it was originally (and what most of the doors in the house still are). 

I started off by scraping up what came up easily. Without getting too gross, bathrooms are a tough space for materials since there are minute, highly acidic particles in the air several times a day, no matter how carefully one aims (and we can say with a certainty that boy children in particular, aren't careful at all). A painted door on the inside looks nice and white until the paint starts peeling under all that acid. So scraping helped that already peeling paint to come off.

Next up, of course, with everyone's best friend, Jasco paint stripper. I had a mostly empty old canister down in the basement, so out it came and I let it get to work:




Such glorious stuff. Sadly, sadly, I discovered that this formula is so terrifyingly powerful, and people are so stupid as to not wear respirators around it, that it is now banned. The new stuff is basically weak crap, the same as every other brand out there. Anyway, as a result, the result of the job was a lot more laborious, with many, many rounds of weak. paint stripper and scraping you ended up with something that looked like this:



And eventually, with the aid of a belt sander (whose belts were so old that they all snapped after just a few seconds -- this is a big issue for belt sanders, evidently), you get this, a door without paint: 



Then the fun part arrives, which is also faster: stain and polyurethane, and voilà:



And finally, for a taste of what this looks like all done, and back in place:



As you can see, even after 3-4 days, there are a few tiny flecks of paint that were deep inside cracks or where one piece of the door meets another, but on the whole, a huge improvement over the old, crusty, peeling version. I'll take it!