| By Greg Vanden Berge
Have you ever heard this from your wife or someone
who's house you are going to work on. ”I want a French door”. These
words seem to send chills up and down my spine. Why do they do this,
why is this a problem you ask. Do you ever go somewhere like a nice
restaurant or even a fancy hotel and see the most gorgeous set of French
doors and then start dreaming of installing them in your castle.
Let me set something straight here.
I just installed a set of French doors in my house.
I built them from scratch so I could save some money and have a nicer
set of doors. The doors I chose to install are quite simply a Douglas
fir framed 10 lite set of 30 inch wide French doors. The Douglas fir is
mainly used for staining and will give you a nice rustic look.
Not only are French doors labor intensive to
install from scratch and quite expensive. They require a very labor
intensive paint job. I have spent up to 12 hours myself painting just
one simple door in my younger days.
Painting the French doors will be the most
difficult task in the installation process. After you actually have
painted the French doors and they do look nice if you used a low quality
paint, this could be a problem in a few years. A better choice when it
comes to painting the French doors will be a high gloss water based or
oil base paint.
Another thing to consider is the location of the
French door. If the French door is located in a part of the home that
gets a lot of Sun you could be painting the door more often. The sun to
wood doors is like termites to a tree. It can be very damaging. The sun
is one of your home's worst enemies when it comes to painting wood.
If you have a set of French doors installed in your
house you might want to very well consider hiring a professional
painter. A professional painter might come in and spray the doors or
hand paint them. Professionally painted French doors can be costly. If
the doors are bare wood they will need to be cleaned and primer before
you actually applied the finish coat of paint to them.
One more problem when it comes to painting French
doors you will need to keep in mind. I have installed French doors and
they work perfectly until they are painted. I have had French doors
warp and twist and this becomes quite irritating. Make sure you paint
the doors in the recommended temperatures and out of direct sunlight.
Remove the doors and paint them elsewhere or create a shaded area while
painting the doors. This information should be found on the paint cans
themselves in an area called “Directions”.
The moral to the story here is French doors look
nice, they require some maintenance and make no mistake these doors take
quite a bit of time to paint. Keep this in mind if you are building a
new home or remodeling one.
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