Doors!

So here's one of those really rewarding posts to see, where some good progress on the house seems to really show. As most of my readers know, I haven't had doors in the house for about 8 years. I bought the house in 2010, and shortly after than time, I started to do some demolition, and I had very few original doors left, and the other existing doors were absolutely awful. Actually, let's just take a few moments to travel down memory lane and revisit what the house was like in 2010:

Living room door. Oh man! Remember when I had light switches half buried inside WALLS?



Same door, from inside living room.



This door was falling apart, re-drilled with a deadbolt, and covered in flaky paint and varnish.



Master bedroom door. This side was not bad, but again, drilled with a deadbolt, and the back side had a panel busted-through (likely kicked-in).





The blue closet door may be original to the house (all the original closet walls were torn down, so it's impossible to know for sure), but the two I had were re-cut, and they are not exactly the same style (with rounded panel corners).



This was a few months later, when the original doorway was opened back up to the original size.





The only other original door left (there were 3 in total) was in the basement, so I don't know which door frame it went to, but it was also drilled for a deadbolt, and had the hinges torn off from it (large chunks of wood ripped out of the edge).



Some detail photos of that same door:





The other doors in the house were all mismatched, modern, and hollow. Some flat, some mahogany veneered, and some with 6 panel (Colonial style).







Basically all the remaining doors were all garbage or too severely damaged to repair.

So after LOTS of searching, getting quotes (as high as 800$ PER DOOR), and considering building my own, I was able to buy some nice quality doors. You can read all about that here:
https://my1923foursquare.blogspot.com/2018/07/went-shopping-doors.html

One of the doors had a damaged corner, so I got it for 75% off (basically it cost me only 20$). Here's how I fixed that one:



It was patched in 2 parts (one side had a larger chunk because the damage was on an angle. I used a router and a straight board as a fence.





After repair:



One of the issues with these particular doors (which I think I mentioned) is that they are quite limited with how far they can be trimmed. The bathroom door needed to have almost 3 inches chopped off due to the normal "shorter than standard" door height, paired with the added height of the plywood subfloor and tile.



I also trimmed the top of the bathroom door a hair shorter than the others to help with the height issue.



This particular door also had a bit of a fit issue with the hinge side being rather tight, and the open edge having almost 1/4" gap, so I fixed that by slightly bending the hinges using a vise and some wood blocks.

This is by far the shortest door. The bottom doesn't look amazing (since the bottom board is so skinny) but I can live with it.







One nice construction detail on these doors is that each joint has two or three 4 inch dowels glued in place.



Most of the doors went in fairly easily, but pretty much all of them required multiple trips back and forth to the garage for slight trimming and adjustments. All the sizing and trimming was done using a jigsaw to cut away the bulk, and then they were trimmed perfectly flush and square with a router and fence.









I was getting excited to finally be able to install all the salvaged hardware and lock sets I've had in storage. The lock sets were NOT fun to fit (because they had to be all hand drilled and chiseled to fit each door), but they all turned out really well. All the hardware is being fitted with slot screws (antiqued as required).





A few of the hinges on the old door jambs will need to have some patching done, and I still need to find correctly sized brass SLOT screws for all the doors. The same will be true for the strike plates (some will need patching and all will need paint touch ups).



The new jambs had everything fitted perfectly (hinges and strikes). I still need to paint the interior bits (holes in the strike) and install the strop mouldings.



Basement door:



Master bedroom:



Bathroom:



Spare room (guest bedroom):



For the colour, I was torn between keeping the doors rather light, but I also really liked the colour of the salvaged front door, so I went and looked for other examples of dark doors to make sure I was making the right choice (ie: going dark):





I did love the look, so I decided to go ahead.

Finding the correct shade of "darkish-reddish-brownish-orangey mahogany" stain proved to be a pain. Most places in town don't offer custom tinted stains anymore, and nothing I had on hand was the right shade. I loved the shade I used on the bed, but it's a water based dye, and I really did NOT want to use a water based dye on these doors. I eventually stumbled on a can of "Mission Oak" stain by Varathane reduced to 5$ at Habitat Re-Store, which was EXACTLY the shade I wanted (or close enough). One can was not going to be enough. I started to look for more, but it seems as though this particular shade is being phased-out. Lowes didn't have any (they had all the other shades but not Mission Oak), but I was lucky to find that Home Depot *did* still have some in stock. Suspiciously that particular shade was on sale. I ended up buying two cans, just in case.



The board above shows the samples I did with the Mission Oak. 1 and 2 are with the Re-Store can (one coat and 2 coats), but then the single coat of the new can (3) seemed darker. I was worried it might be batch inconsistencies, but I think that more than likely I just hadn't mixed it enough.

The first door I did seemed a hair light, so I ended up doing two coats of stain on it. This was the basement door, which is the only door on the first floor (other than exterior doors).



All the doors needed 3 coats of varnish. I used the same thing as on the salvaged front door: Helmsman Spar (marine) varnish in gloss. This shows coat number 2, which still shows a lot of uneven gloss.





The doors look a bit darker in some photos than in person. Due to lighting issues, and my camera not wanting to get the correct white balance, the doors are a bit tricky to photograph properly.



The colour between the two doors (new and salvaged antique) is nearly identical, and I'm really happy with how they turned out.



Again, depending on the lighting, they look really dark, but they are all the same colour. For all the remaining 7 doors (all upstairs) I chose to only do one heavy coat of stain, which turned out to give almost exactly the same colour as the very laborious two coats I had done on the first door.

I was only able to finish 4 of the 8 doors before I started working on the garage roof, and the weather got too cold. The last 4 will be done in spring 2019.

Master bedroom closet:



Bathroom:



Bathroom interior detail:



This last one is the closet door to the spare room. The door frame for that one isn't even built yet as the chimney is still there. I was having issues with the varnish coming out streaky so I wanted to try it again on a less visible door.



Next post will likely be the one showing the huuuuuuge job of redoing the garage roof. Stay tuned!

Patching & Sanding A Friend's Floor - Part 2 (Done)

Here's the rest of Devin's floor refinishing adventure. And oh the fun we had (sarcasm)!

When we last left off, I had scavenged a bunch of old flooring from the hallway to fix the main floor in the living room. That done, we needed new pieces to replace what we took. I gave Devin a cut list of the wood I needed. Basically 4 boards 5" x 40" OR 2 boards 5" x 80" of birch. He went to basically the only place in town that sells hardwood lumber, and dropped off the boards late in the evening. I think he dropped off the wood on Tue night around 11:40pm.

It was too late to start working on it, so on Wed night, I started cutting the boards. Obviously there was WAAAAY too much wood. We needed 14 feet, and I had about 32. It was also very thick (about 1 1/4" and I needed only 3/4" final thickness). Well, as I started to plane the first board, I had to stop immediately because apparently they gave us silver maple (aka soft maple) instead of birch. I was pissed. I already have a fairly low opinion of this company, and this was just typical for them. This was NOT going to work. Maple vs birch have different grain, different colour, it was a no go. I messaged Devin, and he was also NOT happy about this (because he'd have to come back to get the wood and go back to return it. I had told him he'd have to exchange the wood since it was their screw up. He was worried they might not take it back since the wood was already cut, but the pieces were large enough that they could reuse them (40" is long enough for stair treads, which they make), and I told him it was not his problem to worry about. He was able to easily exchange the wood on Thu.

He has a spare key to my place (in case I get locked out), so he just dropped off the wood while I was at work (otherwise we'd have lost another full day since he works till 11pm). I was able to cut the boards on Thu night, and then install them on Fri so that we'd be able to sand on the weekend.

Custom milled tongue-and-groove floor boards:



Installed. I had made the new boards JUST A HAIR wider than the old ones to make 100% sure that I wouldn't end up with a gap, but instead I ended up having to cut off about 1/2" from the last board.



So then came Saturday. Ughhh. So based on some internet research I had done (brief research, I should mention), and based on one post I had seen, a few people had suggested using the square/rectangular orbital sander to sand the floor. This seemed like a perfect option because the floor was pretty flat, HOWEVER, this was not the case. In my mind an orbital sander should have worked fine. Slower than a belt, but because of how it sands, you have little or no risk of gouging the floor.

We rented the rectangular orbital sander, with various grit papers, and started the rough sanding with 20 grit paper. If you're not familiar with sanding grits, the lower the number, the rougher it is. 150 to 180 is usually about the finish you want to sand down to when making furniture in hardwood or softwood, but for rough sanding, I generally use something like 80 grit or 100 grit (on tools like a belt sander). So with 20 grit, it's rough like an ASPHALT ROOF SHINGLE. With paper this rough, I thought it would sand pretty quickly. I expected the sander to carve deep scratchy swirls through the floor in no time.

Again, not the case. Learn from our mistakes here. We sanded with the 20 grit for about SIX HOURS (three of us - Dev, myself, and Devin's father) and it had barely taken down the varnish!





At this rate, we'd be sanding for DAYS. We gave up around 9pm. This was just NOT going to work. It sucked because we wasted the rental and the paper, and also an entire day. On Sunday we rented a belt sander (a smaller one than the 240Lb beast that they had used at the Victorian Farmhouse, see here: http://my1923foursquare.blogspot.ca/2017/01/victorian-farmhouse-part-21-refinished.html) and with the belt (and using 40 grit paper) we took down the wood to bare floor in just minutes. The belt sander is much harder to control, but it was so much faster, and we REALLY needed it to level-out the patched areas (which needed lots more sanding).

This was after maybe 40 minutes of work (Sunday May 28th around noon):



We took turns sanding, first at a 45, then with the grain. I think we did 40 grit, then 60, then 80? Or maybe only 40 and 80? They only had a few grits for this sander.



All the belt sanding done (edges left) and a sample of the stain in the top right corner. Devin and Gen wanted the floor to be close to the original colour it was (shellac) so we found a stain that was VERY close. Varathane Ultimate Wood Stain in the colour Golden Pecan.



Patched area:



The finished sanding with the belt was done with 80 grit (they didn't have a finer grit). I tried my best to smooth out as many bumps as possible, but there were still several of them. I used the hand held belt sander with 80 grit belts to fix most of the small divots and grooves near vents and corners. I used oblique lighting (with a lamp on the floor) for this. The edge sander was rented on Mon or Tue night and I did that alone (Dev was at work, and Gen is pregnant). It did not take very long, and the edge sander is fairly easy to use. They had lots of different grits for the edge sander, but I only used 40, 60, and 80 again.

The ideal would be to then use that first orbital (rectangular) sander and finish-sand the floor to remove any leftover bumps, but we left the floor at this stage (sanded up to 80 grit). Devin did all the staining and varnishing himself during the week (with Gen sleeping over at her in-laws' house away from the toxic fumes).

The floor turned out pretty good. I like the final colour. I haven't seen it in person yet, but I have photos from Devin & Gen.





That one darker board is actually cherry (not birch). It must have gotten mixed-in at the factory.



So yeah. This was a back-breaking and labour intensive job. Days of work. Sore for days afterwards. Yes it's much cheaper than hiring professionals, and you have a lot more control over finishing touches, like where we did patch/putty a bunch of gaps, nail holes, etc, and we sunk-in several nails that we missed while we sanded. A lot of floor refinishers won't bother to do these little extra things (like at the farmhouse).

HOWEVER, on the flip side, the roughly 1200$ to 2000$ that most flooring guys will charge is well worth the time and effort involved if you're not too physically fit, not too DIY savvy, or if you just don't want to deal with the overall stress and pressure of possibly messing-up and gouging the floor, then hiring people might be the better option for you.

For those who are curious, the breakdown was something like this:
- About 150$ for the useless rectangular sander rental + sand papers + pads (which would have been better for final sanding)
- About 150$ to rent the belt sander for the day (including sand paper)
- About 30$ for the edge sander for a few hours + papers (I think I used 4 discs total)
- 45$ in stain (two 20$ quart cans +tax)
- 180$ in varnish (two 80$ gallon cans for 3 coats +tax)
- 15$ for a package of 80 grit belts for the hand held belt sander
- Paint brushes or rollers, painter's tape and other supplies (about 20$ ish)

Total: About 400-600$ depending how many sanding sheets/pads you need, and whether or not you bother to rent the rectangular orbital sander. Prices are in Canadian dollars. The rental places will refund any unused sand paper sheets so just take a bunch and return what you don't use.