Have you ever wondered if you could modernize your solid oak interior doors with some interior door painting? Well, when we purchased this house, like most of those who were built in the 90’s early 2000’s time frame they are outfitted with that ever so wonderful honey oak stain! Well, we weren’t too keen on the honey oak (or oak in general), so we decide to transform the house by painting EVERYTHING in the house; trim, doors, rails, you name it we painted it.
This was very much a family project with everyone getting in on the work. We wanted to get the doors off the hinges and painted fairly early in the process so that we could replace carpet early and shut doors to block off certain places of the house.
Our process after scouring the internet and Pinterest was to remove the doors from the hinges. Bonus tip: We did them room by room and labeled the top of each door w/ a sharpie noting it’s location in order to keep everything straight and hopefully alleviate issues when re-installing! At this point our children were motivated to help; so we put them to work! They sanded, taped (as needed), painted, sanded some more, and painted for what seemed like days on end, but they doors turned out fantastic and allowed us to focus on more hands on projects!
When painting the doors we didn’t use any mind blowing practices, it was just hard work. We started by using a palm sander such as this one from Ryobi, starting with a 100 Grit sheet to really get through the out surface finish. In our case the doors still only had the original stain or paint on them so it was pretty easy to get down to bare wood (or close to it). After sanding we’d vacuum up as much as possible, wipe it down with water, let it dry, and then blow it off with our small Ryobi blower before either sanding again or applying paint. If you don’t have the little Ryobi blower you need to get it! It’s amazing for the price (especially tool only) and can be used for a million different things, not too mention that it’s kid sized so they can get in on the fun as well!
All in all, our interior door painting process took about 3 days per room and at times we had multiple rooms going when we had a couple extra hours. The solid, honey stained oak interior doors took 1-2 sandings each and 2 coats of paint to make the transformation from honey oak to modern gray! We are pleased with how they turned out!
