Interior Door Refinishing and Wood Restoration

What interior door refinishing covers

The list is usually longer than people expect once they look: passage and closet doors, French doors between rooms, the inside face of the entry door, jambs and casing, baseboards where they meet, stair banisters, newel posts, handrails and balusters, plus built-ins and mantels if you want the tone to agree. We strip the old finish, deal with the dents, dog scratches and water rings, sand to a consistent surface, apply stain or a clear finish, and top with a low-odor interior coating chosen for the traffic that surface takes. Handrails get a harder wearing film than a closet door does, because they get gripped every day.

Refinishing interior doors without removing them

Doors that stay hung do not get mixed up, do not need rehanging, and do not leave your rooms open to each other for days. We work with the door in the opening for stripping and sanding under containment, then either finish it in place or move it a short distance to a stand in the same room. Where a door does come off, hinges and hardware are bagged and labeled per door and go back exactly where they came from, which matters in an old house where no two openings are quite the same. Bathrooms and bedrooms are sequenced so you always have privacy in the rooms you need it.

Should I paint or replace interior doors

Replace only if the door is hollow-core builder stock you dislike. If the doors are solid, and in houses built before about 1980 around here they usually are, keep them. A solid six-panel door with real stiles and rails is heavier, quieter and better made than most of what is sold as a replacement, and the casing and jamb around it were cut to that door. Refinishing keeps all of that. It also avoids the part people forget: swapping doors means new hinges, hardware mortises that rarely line up, casing damage and repainting, which is where the real cost of a door swap lives.

Do you have to sand a stained door before painting it

Yes, and on a stained door sanding alone is often not enough. The old finish on interior woodwork is usually a varnish or lacquer that has hardened, yellowed and been polished with silicone-based products for years, and paint applied over that will peel off in sheets within a season. Silicone contamination in particular causes fisheye and adhesion failure that no amount of scuffing fixes. Our answer on a stained door going to paint is to strip it, clean the surface, and prime with a bonding primer before any color goes on. It is more work up front and it is the difference between a five-year job and a five-month one.

Interior door refinishing cost

Interior doors are priced per door and per opening rather than off the exterior bands, because a plain closet door and a French door with fifteen lights are not the same job. Volume matters: a whole floor of doors done in one visit costs less per door than a single door on its own, because the setup, the containment and the color matching are done once. Jambs, casing, stairs and railings are quoted as separate lines. Send us a photo of a typical door and a rough count of what you want done, and we will price it in writing before we start.

How long does interior door refinishing take

A single interior door is usually a one-day job. A set of six to eight doors on one floor typically runs two to three days working through the house in sections, and a full staircase with banisters and balusters is a job of its own because of the hand work in the spindles. Interior finishes cure more slowly than exterior ones in a closed house, so we plan ventilation and sequencing to keep rooms usable. You will have a written schedule with the price, and we tell you which rooms are affected on which day, so you can plan around bedrooms and bathrooms rather than find out on the morning. Doors that come off are back on their hinges before we leave for the day.

Related Services

• Cabinet Refinishing
• Front Door Refinishing
• Door Refinishing Cost

Areas We Serve

• McLean, VA
• Great Falls, VA
• Vienna, VA
• Arlington, VA
• Alexandria, VA
• Falls Church, VA
• Bethesda, MD
• Potomac, MD
• Chevy Chase, MD
• Georgetown, DC
• Silver Spring, MD
• Fairfax, VA
• Ashburn, VA
• Leesburg, VA
• Reston, VA
• Herndon, VA
• Oakton, VA
• Burke, VA
• Springfield, VA
• Capitol Hill, DC
• Kalorama, DC
• Spring Valley, DC
• Cleveland Park, DC
• Rockville, MD
• Annapolis, MD
• Middleburg, VA
• Tysons, VA
• Annandale, VA
• Centreville, VA
• Chantilly, VA
• Sterling, VA
• Manassas, VA
• Woodbridge, VA
• Gainesville, VA
• Haymarket, VA
• Brambleton, VA
• Aldie, VA
• Wesley Heights, DC
• Chevy Chase DC, DC
• Woodley Park, DC
• Massachusetts Avenue Heights, DC
• Kensington, MD
• Cabin John, MD
• Glen Echo, MD
• North Bethesda, MD
• Gaithersburg, MD
• Germantown, MD
• Olney, MD
• Clarksville, MD
• Columbia, MD
• Ellicott City, MD
• Fulton, MD
• Laurel, MD
• Bowie, MD
• College Park, MD
• Frederick, MD
• Hyattsville, MD
• National Harbor, MD
• Upper Marlboro, MD
• Fort Washington, MD
• Waldorf, MD