French Door Restoration

More doors to start restoring today: a pair of old 15 light French doors to separate the dining room (being used as Mom’s bedroom) from the foyer.

I found the ONE pair of doors with my dimensions and window count, in hundreds at the restoration house we visited in Memphis. We bought them for $400 but they needed a lot of work: paint removal, wood filler & window replacement.

When I’m done, they should match the pair separating the parlor from the foyer, that I also worked on recently. The parlor doors had stops, too tight against the doors to allow them to close. I removed them, scraped and sanded off the old caulk and paint lines, then reinstalled, caulked, and painted.

I was planning to have 4 panes of glass cut to replace the broken panes in these French doors. The original glass is old and wavy. While Chelle was cleaning out her studio space she ran across 8 panes of old wavy glass of varying sizes sitting on a shelf. I cleaned them up and cut them down to fit in these old doors. I’m tickled to be able to re-use them and retain the old look. Plus I saved about $32.

The tedious work of scraping each of these panes, front and back to remove old varnish and dirt before the Windex has to be done in doses. To keep me sane. But I’ve got one down! And I really enjoy doing this stuff. I’d really rather spend 10 hours a day working on this house than 8 hours at work to pay someone else to do this.

Update: March 19, 2019

I finally finished up the French Door restoration on Mom’s bedroom doors. I’ve been intimidated by this job for over a year! I was afraid I’d screw it up.