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Interior door work

I've started working on the interior doors, which has proved to be a very dirty job.

The old paint was peeling off of the doors so we decided to strip them all down to the bare wood and repaint them. To accomplish this task, I borrowed my friend's 60 year old 3"x24" belt sander. This thing worked quite well but created a huge amount of dust. I've got dust all over my garage now and upon almost everything in there. I regret not putting up plastic around my work area to contain the dust.

I also took many precautions. I wore glasses, a mask and hearing protection. A belt sander is very loud! I used that piece of equipment for almost four hours. That's a lot of exposure to a high volume of noise.

It took me one hour per door to with the belt sander to strip it down to the wood. I started with 80 grit sand paper, which worked well. I followed that up with 120 grit paper to smooth it out.




After that, Joel and I wiped down the doors to check out their condition prior to filling in any holes or divots in the surface. I think I let the belt sander get carried away because I noticed V-shaped patterns on some of the surfaces. As a result, I had to spackle some large areas on some of the doors. This wasn't too bad because I had the right tools! I had a pretty big spackling knife and a big tub of spackle to go at them with.

Next up, I need to sand and smooth out the doors, clean up my garage and then carefully repaint them. I plan to follow an article I found on Familyhandyman.com.

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