Stripping and Refinishing Old Doors

Some of you know that my husband and I purchased an old home about 2 1/2 years ago and since that time we have been renting it out. Our tennant moved out in May so we decided to gut the home, remodel it and move into it.

We are hoping to get about 1/2 of our home remodeling projects done before August 1st and then move into the home by the end of August. We figure we can do the smaller home remodeling projects once we get into the home.

For the past 2 weeks we have been taking down the interior doors which are all done in a varnished brown finish...typical for a 1960's home. To save us on purchasing interior doors we have been taking them down, sanding off the varnish and wood stain, then repainting them. Wow, what a job that is! We spend about 2 1/2 hours on each dang door!
Once we have that part done we are adding new brushed nickel door hinges and door knobs. We really like the look of the brushed nickel finish.

In 2 weeks we have only gotten 4 doors done as it is a very time consuming process. One door we had to sand down a lot and then mud some small holes that the previous owner had in them. Another one had some type of stain but once we sprayed Killz on it, we were easily able to paint it.
These are good OLD SOLID WOOD doors, not the cheapo doors you can buy now so we wanted to save them plus it's the eco-friendly thing to do. We are trying to not send a lot of stuff to the local landfill and are going to try to refinish and save as much as we can. (picture above shows my spanky new looking solid wood door with the new brushed nickel door knob, so pretty now!).

We still have a lot of interior doors to do...but at least we are making progress. Besides, we wanted to do this now before we rip out all of the old nasty carpeting and flooring because once our new carpeting and flooring goes in, I don't want to mess it up!

Over the next few months I will be blogging about some of our home remodeling projects and sharing some before and after photos. Hubby just rewired all of the electrical work in the master bedroom so we have to replace some wood trim, the flooring, 2 windows and then we can finally paint the walls!