Tag: refinishing

Refinishing an Exterior Door

Whether preparing your home for selling or just keeping it in optimal condition, the front door at some point requires attention. Wood entry doors take a beating from rain, sun, and wind causing the finish to wear and discolor. Many times moisture gets under the finish causing the finish to lift, then the moisture damages the wood. Typical damage is mold, mildew, or rot. My daughter’s wood entrance door has additional damage because her cat and dog repeatedly scratch the door which unfortunately has opened the finish for moisture to gain entrance.

The cost associated with replacing a front door is high, making refinishing a wood door a viable and economical option. A quick online search will result in many how to articles and demonstrations on how to refinish a wood entry door. However, as many of my customers have learned the hard way, it is not such a simple process to get a professional quality result. Refinishing an outside door and its trim is best left to a professional refinisher.

Having a professional refinisher like me refinish your entry door is not cheap, but the door won’t look like the result of a DIY weekend project either.

Easy Answer

With furniture refinishing sometimes there are things that are badly broken; things that are affected by time and the elements, and then there situations that defy reason and make a difficult job really, really difficult. A large government entity once contracted KWS to refinish their wooden benches. These benches were about 14 feet long, and being solid wood were fairly heavy. The challenge, however, was not in the refinishing, but in getting them out of the building.

The benches were on one of the upper floors of the building and the only way out was in the service elevator. The service elevator was quite large with a vertical raising door yet not tall enough to accommodate a bench roughly 14 ft x 3 ft x 2 ½ ft. Well the obvious answer was in the ceiling, or the removing of it. Now most elevators have a removable panel designed for this purpose. Not so this elevator. It had the entire ceiling covered with an expanded metal screen held by a few small welded tacks.

WEHU! this was going to be fairly easy after all. Did I mention that this was a government entity? Yes, and a government building authority that could see absolutely no reason to remove the ceiling screen in the elevator that was specifically made to be easily removed so tall things could get to and from the upper floors. And that was final.

Well I did refinish those benches, I even did it in the time allotted. By now you are wondering how those long benches were removed in order to be repaired, refinished, and returned. Are you ready? They simply had me cut them in half. Are we fortunate or not? GOVERNEMENT always has the answer.