A wooden door restoration service I wish I had known about a long time ago

Repairing, refurbishing or restoring wooden doors in a house is a real challenge. Particularly if it is old and built on the model of the country or manor houses, with tall, single, double, double, folding, sliding, folding doors. And if the doors have lots of small windows, it is even more complicated, and I know from my own experience what this means. Eight years ago, not knowing what I was getting myself into, I decided to fill my time by making some changes in the house, and so I decided to strengthen the walls and restore the doors. Wooden, eight feet high, with a thousand little gems and painted many times over the years.

While I was at it, I wanted to make them as good as I could, so I looked for a team to remove all the layers of white paint that had been applied over the years, to patch the holes and replace the parts that were broken, broken or eaten by curry. I explained all these wishes to the team I was working with, they said they understood and ... the nightmare began. Some were too big and they had nowhere to take them to be cleaned down to the wood, some were impossible to clean the door frames, some that if they replaced parts of the door they might not be the same, plus that glass of that thickness was out of stock (!!!). It was an experience I will remember for a long time. How nice it would have been to have known the SaveMob.

I already told you about them when we talked about saving 100-year-old Chippendale furniture. I liked what they were able to do with that furniture then, but I always thought that furniture is one thing and doors, windows are another. I recently found out that they refurbish and restore including doors and they do it the way I would have wanted my doors 8 years ago.

They have a specialized door reconditioning team that travels to the customer's home. The doors are picked up, nicely packaged, taken to the workshop where they are refinished. Door frames are rebuilt on site at the customer's home. The paint or varnish is cleaned down to the wood, no matter how many layers have built up over time. The wood is grouted, repaired and inspected to see if it is attacked by decay. If it is, the wood is changed so that it doesn't infest the rest of the wooden objects in the house. They are then sanded, stripped and refinished, depending on how they were originally or the customer's wishes.

In the workshop the work is done at a leisurely pace. It's not that hinges don't require a lot of care and attention, it's just that hinges are simpler, without as much detail and machining as doors, which are a real challenge. If the doors are painted, the same steps are followed as for the door frames: clean, check, replace damaged parts that can no longer be salvaged, treat with curry, sand and repaint.

If the doors are veneered and clear-finished, the steps are more difficult and need to be worked very carefully. In general, old doors have intricate patterns made from veneers of different veneers, something like inlays, but on a macro level.

Over time, veneer is the first to fail due to moisture, mechanical shock or low strength or ageing of the adhesive. As a result, it needs to be reworked.

It's not easy to find large pieces of veneer that look like the one you need to replace, but if you leave it to the specialists, you don't have to worry about it.

If the veneer is aesthetically pleasing, the door will be varnished, certainly not painted. Choose the wood so that it resembles the original and color the veneer. Then apply gund and clear varnish, with sanding in between so that the door has a smooth, smooth surface.

Even if they are made separately, the door is always checked to make sure that it resembles the door frame. At the end the door is packed, shipped to the customer's home, assembled and checked so that everything is as the customer wanted it. As I was saying, I wish I had known them when I was redoing the doors!