The Ancient Basement–the Joys of Old Doors

We are going for a 1930’s English pub vibe in our basement because we have low-ish ceilings and we have to use stone veneer on some of the walls, so that lends itself to that look. As a result, we decided early on that we were going to use antique doors. So last March (2022), I found someone who was selling a bunch of matched 2 long vertical panel doors, I think 7 total. When we went to pick them up from near Toledo Ohio, we found that he not only had the seven that I bought from ebay, but he had quite a few more. We prowled through all his outbuildings and came home with the original seven, plus three exterior doors with windows (one has a broken window, and I think it’s going to be the door to my husband’s office), and then two little doors that we are using for the closets on either side of the wood stove.

We asked Jim about the doors and he said that the two long vertical panels were popular only for a short time in the second quarter of the 19th century. He figured that they were close to two hundred years old. He couldn’t remember where he had gotten them because he had stored them in his shop for at least 50 years when he didn’t use them in the renovation/additions to his house. The two exterior doors that I used for the closet under the stairs and the storage room had been exterior doors on Jim’s house, but he replaced them at some point. He couldn’t remember anything about the two little doors. He said that he and his wife traveled all around northwest Ohio looking for items that they could use in their house–especially doors and molding.

These doors are not like modern doors in their construction. They are put together with mortise and tenon joints, but the tenons go all the way to the edge of the door.

The doors are pegged with wooden pegs to hold the mortise and tenon joints together.

This means that there isn’t any glue in the doors, which given their age and the chemistry of glue from that era would have disintegrated by now. All the really old doors that we bought used to have rim locks instead of modern door knobs. The mechanism was attached to the exterior of the door and only the rod holding the two knobs went through the door. There is a store in Waynesville, OH that sells refurbished antique rim locks and rim latches, but you can find modern ones on Signature Hardware’s website, among others.

Unfortunately during their long tenure in a house they were painted a number of times, and there were some BOLD color choices like this orchid which was on top of blue, gray, tan, and the original shellac. One of the other doors has mustard yellow, and another one has acid green. I think that they all came out of the same house, so that was one COLORFUL house, and possibly also a little jarring.

I haven’t tested the paint, but based on how it behaves, I’m sure that it’s lead based, so I wear a mask and glasses when I work on it and take a shower when I am finished. We are scraping the paint off of the doors because we are trying to preserve the patina and we tried Citristrip and it made a mess and we’re worried about getting paint in the grain of the wood.

Anyway, it is a long and tedious process. I did the big flat sections of the doors with a heat gun and scraper last summer and now I am going back with the little scraper to get all the details. I had to do all the finish scraping on the large flat sections of the door above and one panel of the detail and that took about 4 hours. Fortunately, my husband already did the other side. So I will be doing a lot more scraping so that we can, at least, get the doors that are already hung completely clean and lacquered.

Fun times…..