No More Baby Gates

Finally no more baby gates keeping the dogs out of the other rooms. We got around to replacing the doors (considering we have a new guest coming soon). We decided to go with the six panel doors. We headed to our favorite home improvement store to buy four doors, getting them home was an interesting experience to say the least. We are thankful for having a hatchback car, without it, I don't think we'd have a lot of what we own.


We also decided that we had to repaint the utility/storage room door too. One side was painted an icky white and the other was the original brown stain from the 1970's. We removed the door and put two coats of primer on it. Afterward, we painted it a semi-gloss white. Once dry, we replaced the gold door knob and hinges with satin nickel ones to bring it out of the 20th century to the 21st.

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Finally on to the other doors....

 

We decided to remove the guest bath door as well since the prior paint job was not so great. First we had to check how the doors fit in the frame, we found that we had to cut off the bottom of the doors to fit in the frames. Also had to plane the sides of most. We only found out now, that they make electric planers.

Since the doors were already primed, all we had to do was paint them. We used a 1 1/2" angled brush to do the panels going with the grain. After we used a hot dog roller to paint the rest, also going with the grain. After they dried we brought them back in to see where the hinges needed to be. We marked them and took it back outside. We then traced the hinges on the door, then used a chisel and hammer to cut into the door. Once complete, we installed the hinges on the door and on the frame in the house. The final step was installing door knobs, we used lockable ones for the bedrooms and bathroom. We used hall/closet ones on the utility room and linen closet.
After we hung all the doors, we went around replacing all the painted on gold hinges with nice new satin nickel finish hinges on all the other doors in the house not needing replaced. Replacing hardware can make everything look great.

Bathroom door got a new coat of paint while the utility one dried in the sun

Measuring for the cut

Marking a straight line

We used the metal level as a guide to ensure a straight line

We found that we couldn't weigh the door down to plane it, so someone became the weight

Marking the hinge

Hinge goes here

To make it easier to chisel, scour with razor

Then chisel it out

Remember, they are sharp

All done

Make sure it's flush with the wood

So it looks sexy like this

We got doors!!!

Nasty painted on gold hinges

Pretty new ones..oh yeah