The Most Satisfying Repair – Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorm, Maine. To introduce this next job requires an on-site visit, so let's go. Here's the front door to our house. So this is a pre-Revolutionary War house. It was built in 1771, but this door is later than that. Possibly when the second generation took over, they installed a whole new doorway system here with lights, these glass panels, and a newer door. I don't know how to date doors, though. Maybe I can research that a bit. But this door is a rough shape. House face is south, so in the wintertime this gets a full sun. These certainly appear to be the original strap hinges. I mean to the original door probably, although they're screws instead of nails. The door should just lift right off. This hardware could be from the original door also. It's certainly of that period. And there's no key on this door. The door can only be locked from the inside with a sliding bolt. I'm going to ask my neighbor to help me and see if we can't get this door into the shop. There's quite a few issues here. The knocker is nailed on. That could be an issue if I want to get it off. This molding definitely needs to be replaced, maybe some others too. The handle's screwed on, so I should be able to get that off. A lot of the joints in the door like this one are wide open. We'll just have to see if they can come back together or not. I'm going to see if I can get under this. I think I'm going to leave this alone for now. I'm having some luck getting under this one. Boy, I'm under this thing, but it doesn't want to move. I want to apply some heat, but I think instead of grabbing a heat gun, I'm going to try using a soldering iron to heat up the individual nail. All right, I've kept this soldering iron on this nail for over five minutes. It's not budging. That's a piece of metal that must have levered up a corresponding piece in the door jamb. I'll have to check that out. You know, I was going to put a clamp across here to see if I could bring these joints together, but I realized the joints are all pegged, so it's not coming together. Now I need to see if I can get these moldings off. just nailed back into position. I'll be using Titebond 3 waterproof glue. Okay, we've got all the moldings off. I know I got to make some new molding. I'm going to replace at least four pieces. I've got to pull all these nails out. I can't get over the size nails they used. These are two and a half inches long, a little over six centimeters, and also the small brads. These are cut nails, but the early type of cut nails that were in use at the end of the 18th century. The thinking was that this door was from about 1800, so that definitely supports that. So I've repaired all the places where there was damage from the nails being pulled out. I'm going to set these moldings aside and start setting up to make some new molding. While I'm doing that, I'm going to put some stripper on an area of this door and see how that works. Okay, I'm going to try some stripper here in a couple of spots. This is a non-methylene chloride stripper. I don't recommend any particular type of stripper. I've had this container for like 20 years. I'm not sure if I'll ever use it up. So while waiting on the stripper, I'm getting started on making a few feet of this molding. Luckily it's very simple, just an angled cut, and I have some old wood here. In fact, this wood is reclaimed lumber from a mill in New Hampshire. Recently I did a video about my top of my kitchen island, which is made from this wood. This is left over. I think it's going to be the perfect wood for these moldings. Let's see how that stripper's doing. Certainly looks good so far. This is very coarse number three steel wool. That stripper worked great. The wood looks good. Check out this spot. Yeah, the remover's working fine. This looks really bleached out. I can go ahead and coat this down. I have to tape off the edges first. So what I've done so far is I put on one coat of stripper, let that work for a while, scraped it off. Then I put a second coat on and I scrubbed with number one steel wool. And then off camera I gave it a quick wash of TSP, that's trisodium phosphate, mixed in water and I gave it a rinse. And now I'm going to mix up a new bucket of TSP and give it another rinse. I'm going to do it at an angle and then I'm going to take this outside so it can dry better. Okay, so I've got TSP, trisodium phosphate. I'm going to mix, there's an eighth cup measure, I'm going to mix two of these, say a quarter cup or say 120 milliliters to a gallon of hot water or 3.8 liters. And once again like before I'm going to use number one steel wool. Okay, that's cleaner yet. I know that eventually I'm pretty sure I'm going to want to treat this door with oxalic acid, but I'm going to sand it first. There's a lot of places I think the finish is kind of baked into the wood. I got to sand it to see what I've got. So I'm going to wheel it outside, see if I can get it to thoroughly dry. It's great the door finally dried out in the sun. This wood was so coarse and so distressed it was just soaking up the liquids like a sponge and was not drying. So I'm real happy about the way it is now. You can really see how badly the wood, the exposed wood, is worn. This is pine. Here it is nice and smooth. It looks like pine. This is actually, this surface is lower than that surface. It's just been worn away. All the soft grain is torn out. In fact it looks more like oak than pine. All of you who've watched my videos in the past know I don't like to sand. I really sand a minimum. I like to keep the character of a piece. But in this particular case the damage we see on this door here is due to neglect. And more importantly I need to put the best possible exterior grade finish I can on this door to preserve it for the future because it's going to be outside and a full sun. And so I need to sand all these smooth to ensure that I get the best possible finish I can on here. Well there you go. I've sanded just one panel. It took me about two hours. But I was determined to get all that worn away grain smoothed out. Take a look at this. You can see how much this board is hollowed out. That's almost five millimeters or almost three sixteenths of an inch. So I was very concerned that as I went after that I didn't want to make it worse. You know my sander would be gone like this and could easily make it worse. So when I sanded over here I worked very hard at sanding down the entire panel as much as I could the same. And I didn't correct the situation but I didn't make it any worse either. But the wood hand sanding to do. I've got to sand them well with 100 and 150. And I've got to make sure any orbital marks are not, you know, are gone. But now I've got to start in on all the the wooden frame the styles and stuff. Like so many places on this door this wood is downright punky. That's why I'm glad I'm sanding it down to new wood. But I think I need to try again if I see if I can get this knocker off of here. I have a strong suspicion that that's not an antique nail. I'm so glad that this came off. This wood it really needs to be sanded back and finished properly. I realized I really need to sand this a lot down to new wood. I've got to sand through over it now. This was 80 grit. I'm going over it now by hand. I'm going to do these panels by hand with 100 grit. I've got to bring these corners down. I've got to scrape these edges. Then I get into this corner with some 100 grit paper and a nice hard block. Now I'll sand the entire panels just by hand with this block. It's important to get all the orbital sanding marks out. I'm hoping you can see the orbital sanding marks. If you can't you might be able to detect there's a bit of like fuzziness there. Slight bit of fuzziness. I actually sanded this with 100 and 150 which is what I'm going to do to the entire panels, the entire door. So I'm hoping you can see the difference. These moldings are no longer flat. They've been hollowed out too just like the flat but then this whole back coves out. I'm going to have to fill all this tear out. Okay I've got all these moldings scraped and sanded. I glued up any splits in the moldings that I could find. So now I think I'm going to treat everything with a coat of white vinegar panels is where we see most of the mold damage. Okay the vinegar dried overnight. Now I want to fill all these joints. There's a lot of opening in these joints and I want to seal it off from any moisture from the weather. These joints are really wide open. It's not practical to try to glue this back together. I'd have to remove all these pegs even possibly take the whole door apart and I'm not sure that's the best thing to do. So I decided what I want to do is I'm going to mix up some West System epoxy. I've saved sawdust from sanding the piece. I've already been experimenting. I know I'm going to have to add some color too and I'm going to fill in those with a combination of West System and the sawdust. But the first thing I'm going to do is tape off the areas surrounding these joints. I don't want that epoxy to get on the bare wood or put it this way. I want to minimize it. I was experimenting a bit and mixing up epoxy mixing up sawdust from the door which was too dark. So I had to add a little bit of color to it a lighter color seafoam. This will undoubtedly sink down a bit and I'll have to come back and refill it. Oh yeah you can really see on this one how it's sinking in so I'll just refill it. I'm also going to fill a lot of holes that are in these moldings. There's nail holes that I'm not going to reuse but even the nail holes the original nail holes that I'm going to reuse I want to get some epoxy in there especially on the backs where they're split up split a bit. I'm doing the bottom of the door with clear epoxy. I especially want to seal up the end grain here. Now before this epoxy hardens I want to pull the tape off otherwise this tape won't want to come off tomorrow morning. All right the epoxy seems like it's dried fine let's now smooth this off and get on to the next step. Yeah the epoxy did get under the tape a little bit but I don't think it's going to be a problem. Okay the next step would be to install the moldings around these panels but there's something I want to do first. I want to finish this surface the part of the panel that's underneath the molding. I want to finish this surface also the back of the piece of molding and the top. I want to finish on all those surfaces before I nail this down. I realized I needed to finish sanding the moldings before I did this and and fit them where they belong especially the two new pieces of molding I made. My new moldings are sitting high in the back. I quickly realized that it's it's high here in this corner where I couldn't sand it you know as much as I did the rest of the panel. I could attempt to take this down but I think I'm better off just taking some off the back of the molding. Okay I have the moldings ready to install and now I'll do the first step of the finishing process which like I said is to seal up all these surfaces that will not be accessible when the moldings are attached. In consultation with my brother Gray I decided to use this finish this PPG Prolux. It used to be called Cetol C-E-T-O-L now has a new name and you have your primary coat and your top coat. Both these finishes are heavily pigmented and of course you need that heavy pigment to provide any sort of UV protection. Any clear finish by definition cannot provide UV protection no matter what it says on the can. Okay this is the next afternoon about 24 hours have gone by and luckily it seems dry pretty dry not completely but I think I can abrade it slightly with a Scotch-Brite pad and then I'll put on the top coat. This is the top coat. They're calling this natural but it has stain in it too but not as strong as the Darko stain. Okay everything's dried really well I let it dry over two nights so not 48 hours but like 40 hours. I also turned on a little electric heater in here yesterday because it's so humid and relatively cool like not even 70 degrees but now I can start installing moldings. I realized I needed to put all the moldings in place for each panel before I start nailing these down just to make sure they're located correctly. The original nails were pretty big I was surprised how big they are. I'm going to use these smaller nails. Okay all the moldings are down I'm going to remove this this tape sand along this edge here then I'm going to tape off again and I'm going to fill the gap and all the moldings with this Minwax high performance wood filler. This is acetone by the way that I'm using to wipe off the excess with. This putty I think is going to work out fine. It dries really fast so the time that you have to get it into the spaces is not that long but then it does have a good five or ten minutes of workable time here where I could scrape this down wipe it off should hardly be any sanding at all. This first piece was difficult too because I was shooting a video while I was doing it. This fast drying stuff is not what you want to be working with when you're making videos so I'll be learning as I go along about how much of a batch to mix at a time and just work my way around. Okay I'm all done with the putty. I cleaned up really well with the scotch brite pad and the acetone and now I'm going to go over it with some 100 grit and then 150. Okay I've sanded up to 150. I'm real happy about the putty. I mean I feel like I've sealed everything up. No water is going to get in to the internal parts of this door so now I'm ready for the first coat of finish. All right this looks good. It's about 24 hours now. It's dried well. I kept the heat up last night to 21 degrees or 70. I had a portable electric heater on all day today. It's quite warm in here but it's really dried up nicely. I'm going to get someone to help me stand this up so I can take a look at it. Okay it looks good and and looks more or less the same as it did when it was in the horizontal position. That's what I needed to check. You know obviously this panel's lighter, that panel's lighter. I'm going to give the door another coat, another primary coat which is a dark oak only I won't give that dark oak coat to these darker elements like these moldings that were so dark. I'll go heavy on that one. Well at least I know now that what I'm seeing in the horizontal position is the same as the vertical position. So I'm going to put on that second coat. They recommend two of the primary coats. You know unfortunately these dark moldings letting this dry for four days now. I've had the heat up to 24. I've had the dehumidifier on and a fan on to keep the air circulating. Finally it's it's dry enough. It may still feel a little element of tackiness to it but it's not like I can press into it fingerprints or anything. It's really rough with dust and stuff. It was sitting here wet for so long. It doesn't really want to sand that well. It kind of rolls up into these little balls but I found that a gray ultra fine scotch brite pad works really well. So I will go over the whole door with a scotch brite pad. I'm wiping it off with the mohawk wax wash remover. It's some sort of like a paint thinner. and I'm really glad. It's really nice and dry. Of course I've left the heat up, fan on for air circulation, dehumidifier. So this is great. I'm going to continue to let this dry. I'm going to turn our attention to the hardware. I've already experimented a bit on this plate. I soaked it in some vinegar and it cleaned right up. It's funny, it looks like it's almost starting to rust a little bit just in the 20 minutes since I've done this. So I'm going to clean these with vinegar and some 4-aught steel wool and then I'm going to paint them black with some enamel. This is part of the weather stripping system. I don't know if I'm going to use this or not. I think I might but I'm going to hold off cleaning it until I'm sure I want to use it. 24 hours and it's really good. In fact I'd like to put another coat on it but I need to sand it and I think I'm going to have to wait a month or two to do that. It's really dry. It's dry enough to handle. I know that the sample I made, it took really about I think two or three weeks to really cure and I want this to kind of cure so I can sand it, put another coat on. I'll do that in September but today I can put the hardware on and put this door back where it belongs. I've got to relieve the wood a little bit in the center here to account for this big rivet. There must have been a dent there before. I believe there was. I must have sanded it away. I'm going to put some epoxy in there to seal it. I've got a similar issue with the rivets behind the handle. Oh there we have it. Our very own front door all nicely refinished. I feel like I've got it really sealed up. There's no place for water to get in here, get behind the wood like it did before. This door will get another coat in September when it's not so humid. This door will face south. It'll be fully exposed to the elements. There'll be no more storm door. I think that glass door contributed a lot to the damage we were seeing. I'm going to build a plank door though that will hang where the storm door was just in the winter time for about four months. I can imagine the original door of this house might have been a plank door so that'll be a good look too. I have 80 hours in this job. I use the table saw, the bandsaw, and these hand tools and materials. If you enjoyed my video please subscribe, like, share it on other platforms. I'd appreciate it. I think it looks pretty good.