Dining Room Doors: The Big Reveal

Finally finally finally we’ve completed the dining room doors. Ok, so it’s not really a ‘Big’ reveal, more of a medium sized one but we’re finally here.

You may remember from this post that when we moved in, the doors in my dining room looked like this:

Door to the cellar

Door to the hallway

One brown doorknob

And just to keep things interesting, one white. Nice.

Mmmm scratched up brown doors with mismatched doorknobs. Sexy.

We had to install a cat flap into the door to the cellar so that the kitties could eat and poop as that’s where their food and litter tray will live. While not the most gorgeous looking thing, it does serve a purpose.

My sexy boyfriend W installs the catflap.

Admittedly, the doors had quite a few scratch marks and what I can only describe as ‘pocks’ in them – little holes every few inches that someone obviously put there on purpose. No idea why. What we initially thought was that we could hand sand the doors, prime and then paint them and that this would be enough to hide the marks.

Unfortunately, this was not even remotely the case. In fact, the glossy white finish merely made the marks show more prominantly. Well, we all make mistakes eh? Live and learn.

So we decided to fill the holes. The filler was a dark red colour which made the doors look as though they had been on the scene of a terrible incident.

Some more sanding after the filler had dried but wow, a lot of filler was used. The door to the cellar came up fine but the scratch marks and holes were deeper in the door to the hallway so we decided to take drastic measures.

Or do what we probably should have done from the beginning: Take the door off the hinges and use a belt sander on the entire thing. I don’t have any pictures of the doors being sanded because the DUST was unbelieveable and covered every thing around it. Thankfully, this was done in the cellar but yeah, lots and lots of dust.

After this, we were able to rehang the doors, prime them again and repaint them. So much better second time around.

And finally, we were able to break out these babies.