Preparing Door Frames for Paint

This is a tedious job. This week, I've spent about 12 hrs preparing four door frames and four hallway cabinet frames for painting. Why does this take so long you ask? Because I had to scrape off layers upon layers of bad paint to get down to a stable surface to paint on. And then I had to sand down the surfaces so they'll be nice and smooth with it comes time to paint.

I probably went overkill on it but I did four different things to prep the surface. I scraped off a lot of the bad paint with a 2" carbide blade scraper and sanded with 60 grit sand paper and a medium and extra fine coarse sanding sponges.

In addition, we've discovered we have a layer of lead paint. I was so discouraged at that news. But we got some help from Allison's dad who told us to take simple precautions against inhaling lead dust.

I went with wet sanding to keep the lead dust down to a minimum, which worked very well.

I also learned not to work to hard on surfaces that are intact. Otherwise, you work it so much that you start to tear up the paint and end up with holes in it or the paint starts to curl up and then you're left having to scrape up those small curls. So if the surface is sound then go easy on it!

So after an arduous day, I think it's ready to be primed and painted.

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