Refinishing Your Door

If your front door is showing wear and tear, window replacements will help, but you’ll still need to refinish your door in order to make it really shine. Wood entry doors everywhere suffer from the effects of water and sun, and most of the time people throw away the doors and replace them with low-maintenance (read: cheap!) replacements, but this doesn’t have to happen! Read our tips for saving your door:


1. First thing’s first, you’ll have to take off the hardware before refinishing the entry door and installing replacement windows in your Bronx home.

2. Rest the door on padded sawhorses and sand the flats with a random-orbit sander with 80-grit paper. Then, sand the wood again with 100-grit paper followed by 120-grit.

3. Use small, sharp scrapers to gain access into corners, narrow profiles and on the end grain of raised panels (parts not accessible by rotary sanders). Use two hands to pull the scraper with the grain.

4. Next, hand-sand profiles using a half sheet of 100-grit sandpaper folded into thirds. Use a sanding sponge on inside corners and then clear away dust.

5. Before rehanging, seal the door’s bottom and top edges with a coat of finish. Put the door back on its hinges before applying the first coat.

6. Pour finish into a clean bucket and dip the bristles of a new China-bristle brush 1/3 of the way into the liquid. Be sure to soak the brush in paint thinner for a few minutes before. Start with the panels and move to the surrounding moldings, horizontal rails and vertical stiles.

7. Be sure to let the door dry overnight before closing it.