Can Old Doors Be Repaired?
I have doors on my mind.
Once upon a time I never even thought about doors. They were just there, hanging in houses, available to open and close as the whim would strike. I am not sure I ever really even noticed doors until we bought our first house. Then I realized with horror that most of them didn’t close properly.
In the house we are currently restoring, the door problems have typically been cracked panels. Cracked panels happen when the wood is not allowed to expand and contract, most often this is due to excessive layers of paint acting as a glue in the joints.
For the past few weeks I have been working on repairing and repainting doors that are original to our 1900ish house. There is one door that I am not certain can be salvaged.
So far I have found several different ideas about how to remedy the problem. The most ambitious is to take the door completely apart, replace the cracked panel, and put the entire door back together. Everyone seems to agree that this is time consuming and not worth the effort unless the door is very special and will not be painted.
The second option is to strip the entire door, working especially carefully in the joints where the panels meet the stiles, to free the panel. Once the panel is freely floating again a polyurethane glue can be used to join the pieces of the cracked panel back together.
A third option is to use a wood epoxy product to fill the crack. Not having tried this, and not knowing anyone who has tried this approach, I wonder if the wood would just crack in a different location.
The final option is to buy wood veneer that you would then cut to size and stick on top of the cracked panel. Then paint as usual.
I am leaning toward the fourth option with my problem door, since there are multiple cracks in multiple panels. I keep thinking that no matter what I do, it can’t get any worse. Right?
