Oh my gosh, totally worth it! Sometimes it takes us a while, but nobody said doing it right was the fastest way to go. We are going on month 3 on our living room. One of these days it will be finished. Great looking front door!

Holy smokes! That looks great!

OK, that answers my question of whether to save the front door...

Inspirational.

The door looks beautiful. Great job!

You mentioned you turned your door around. How hard was that to do? We had to move a door also and I just posted how hard is it to turn a door around? Do you think it was worth it?

Actually, I did not turn the door around, one of the previous owners had swapped the door around. They did not change the direction of the door opening but simply turned the door around so that the inside of the door was facing outside and vise-versa. I think that they did that so they could install a new lockset / drill new holes without having to deal with the old mortise lock holes. They just filled with spackle and painted....

If you need to change the direction of how the door opens, it should be do-able but I say that not knowing the full circumstances of your particular house

Diane

That door looks great now! How did you strip the paint off of it?

As you probably know, Diane, the veneers on your door are Douglas Fir for the interior (now exterior) and likely oak for the exterior (now interior). This was far and away, the most common way it was done here in California.

Here are some photos of the doors on my 1913 4-plex. They are also fir on the inside and oak on the outside.

Yea, your right they are some sort of veneer. I am not sure if the veneer is Oak or Doug Fir. It was in pretty bad shape and considered replacing the veneer but wanted to try and refinish first. If it came out badly, there was always the option to re-veneer.

When I first bought my bungalow I thought maybe the flat front door style was a replacement door but as I walked the neighborhood, I see a lot of very similar door styles on the houses built in the same era. I also stumbled across in my web wanderings a scanned catalog of doors from the same era that featured wood "flat front" doors for your bungalow as opposed the stylized "craftsman door" that seem to be de rigueur for a bungalow restoration.

1923, I used a heat gun and an infrared stripper to do the first round of stripping followed up up with sanding a more detailed clean up.

Diane

The "after" shot of the front door looks absolutely stunning.

This is why I don't think I'll ever again reply to one of these "Should I do ...." threads. When reading through this just now, my first thought was that you should replace the door and sidelights. Didn't look worth saving in my opinion. But your photo of the final result changed my mind. It looks fantastic. Excellent job.

David

My house is in the ongoing process of recovering from a 1980s makeover, which included a cheap pine front door. One day last year I was coming out of a local convenience store, where across the street a 1910-era apartment building was being refurbished. I raced across the street when I saw two workmen carrying a door around the building to the dumpster (I swear I could hear it crying "Help! Help!" like a damsel about to be thrown into a volcano as I raced to it's rescue in a silent film hero fashion). I caught them just before they pitched it in. It was so covered in ugly paint they wondered that anyone actually wanted it.

After removing the umpteen layers of paint, I found the solid old doug fir beneath was in pretty good shape, and it was almost exactly the same size as the doorjamb it was to fit into (a couple inches needed trimming off the bottom, the sides were exactly the right size). You'd never know it hadn't been there all along.