Tips on Updating & Remodeling a Door

Series Summary

A door is a panel that is used to securely close or open a passageway into or out of a building, room, vehicle, or cage. Doors are universal in purpose, but vary from building to building in individuality and décor. Some doors are made of solid wood or metal. Other doors exhibit glass panels and other accents that make each door different to the personality of the building or room that it is in.

In this series of expert video clips, you will get many ideas for updating and redecorating your door. These videos lead you step-by-step through the process of refinishing, replacing hardware and repainting your door. Learn about the hinges, door knockers and weather stripping that make your door work! Get expert tips on protecting your door by using a primer and protective paint. If you want to add a special effect to the paint of the door, you can spackle before you paint to get a different texture. Get expert tips on caring for your new door and learn more about this fun do-it-yourself project!

Video Transcript

"Hi, I’m Grady Johnson representing Expert Village.com. Now as we look at this door you can see it needs a lot of work. First thing this is a really outdated handle so we are going to change out this hardware. You can see it is all kind of old and ratty so we are going to take off these screws right here and usually these things have a little hulk and there is a teeny hole right here (I don’t even if you can pick it up on the video camera, but right here there is a little hole. We are going to pop something in there and we are going to pop that loose. Now when it comes to the hinges I change them out occasionally but not when they look this good. This is a really nice set of hinges. What we are going to do is pop this out right here. Going to put a screw driver under that and pop that out. Now these buttons need to be forced all the way up if they are not. They are in pretty good shape. Then we are going to clean all this up right in here with a little bit of putty knife and wire brush and then we will prime all that up and sand it all down. I do most of my work while the door is hanging in a remodeling job. I got to take this one off because of this right here. You can see they tried to shave down the edge of this one but they did not quite get up far enough so we get this all taken off I want to shave it down a little more because you can notice here this is not quite closing like it is supposed to. In addition, we are going to have to really clean this up. Now this is just a matter of using a five-in-one tool or putty knife and scraping all the loose paint both on the hinges and the door. Then we are going to sand all that down and get it kind of smooth even though our primer is going to bring up a lot of the grain. Now also on this particular door we are going to do both sides just because when this was done before it was just kind of a face lift; they didn’t get down deep and clean this up. So what I am going to do now is clean all of this up and then we are going to prime both sides of the door. After that is primed and the primer dries it out, we will then sand it a little bit more, get it nice and smooth and then we will do our caulking on these little seams. We use a standard caulking gun and then go ahead and clean it up and fill in all of these cracks. "