Staining Wood Doors and Gates

A wood entry door is the most looked-at piece of wood on a house, and the one people touch most. Visitors stand in front of it, you open it several times a day, and on many San Diego homes it is the one element that shows real timber against painted stucco. Garden gates are its harder-working cousins: opened with a hip, latched with a hand, swung into in the wind and splashed by the sprinklers on the path. Staining either of them is close, detailed work, and the parts that decide how long it lasts are mostly the ones nobody looks at.

How much sun does your door actually get?

A door on a west- or south-facing wall with no porch roof takes direct afternoon sun, and in El Cajon that is hard sun for much of the year. Ultraviolet light breaks down both the stain and the wood surface beneath it, and the heat cycle opens joints between the panels and the frame.

A door set back under a deep porch, as on many Craftsman homes in North Park or Spanish Revival houses in La Mesa, may never see direct sun at all. Its finish ages slowly and mostly wears where hands push it. Two doors stained on the same day with the same product can need attention years apart.

So the first thing Ebenezer does is look at where the door sits, how deep the overhang is and what the finish on it is doing now. That decides how much pigment the stain should carry and how often you should expect to look at it again.

Why the hardware comes off

Handles, deadbolts, kick plates, knockers, hinges where practical and the mail slot are removed rather than masked. Taping around a lever handle leaves a thin ring of unfinished wood that water finds, and a hard line where the tape was lifted. With the hardware off, the stain goes into the bore holes and behind the escutcheons, and the hardware goes back onto a finished surface.

Removed hardware is kept together and labeled, and when a lock comes off, the day is planned so the house is closed up and secure before work stops.

Every face, including the ones you never see

A door has six faces: the front, the back, the two vertical edges, the top and the bottom. The top and bottom are end grain, and end grain absorbs moisture far more readily than the face of a board. On a lot of doors those two edges were never sealed at all, or were sealed at the factory and not since.

The result is a familiar pattern: the face of the door looks reasonable, but the finish is lifting along the bottom rail, the panels have swollen, and the bottom corners are darkening. Water from rain blown under the overhang, sprinklers, mopping the entry and morning dew is wicking up through the unsealed bottom edge.

This is the strongest argument for taking the door down. Off its hinges and laid across trestles, every edge can be reached, the finish can be laid on flat without runs on the panels, and the work can be checked in good light. When a door has to stay hung, the edges are still finished, with more care and more time.

If the bottom of the door or the frame is soft or rotted, that is a repair before it is a finish, and you will hear about it at the estimate.

Glass, weatherstripping and the panels

Doors with glass need the glass protected and the glazing beads or stops finished carefully, because water runs down glass and sits at the joint with the wood. Any failed seal there is noted before staining. Weatherstripping is protected or removed and refitted so it is not glued in place by stain.

Raised-panel doors are stained in a particular order so the finish does not pool in the corners or leave lap marks across the rails:

1. The panels, working stain into the profiled edges first.
2. The vertical center members, between the panels.
3. The horizontal rails, top, middle and bottom.
4. The outer vertical stiles, last, from top to bottom.

Excess stain is wiped or brushed out as the work goes, so the grain shows evenly across the whole door.

The inside face is a different job

The inside of an entry door lives in your hallway. It never sees sun or rain, and it is often finished to match interior trim or floors rather than the outside of the door. It may need a different product from the exterior face, and it has to be done in a way that fits around you living in the house that day.

Gates work harder than doors

A gate has most of a door’s problems plus several of its own.

• Sag. Gates tend to drop on the latch side over time. A sagging gate drags its bottom edge on the path, which scrubs the finish off the most water-exposed part of it, and it strains the hinge-side post. Hardware is checked and adjusted before staining, because otherwise the new finish is worn through within weeks.
• Hand wear. The area around the latch and pull is touched every day, often with damp or gardening hands. It needs a finish that tolerates that, and it is the first place a gate will need a touch-up.
• Rust. Gate hinges, latches and screws rust, especially near the coast in Point Loma and Ocean Beach and anywhere a sprinkler reaches. Rust bleeds through stain as dark streaks, so it is cleaned and the metal treated before the wood is finished.
• The posts. The gate is only as good as what it hangs from. A post that is soft at the ground line is raised with you before any finish goes on.

Cleaning old wood back before staining, and choosing how solid a stain should be, are topics in their own right: see wood cleaners and brighteners and transparent, semi-transparent or solid stain. For a door or gate they are part of the same visit and the same conversation.

Where to begin

A front door is a small job by the clock, but not a small job in how much it is seen, and there is no job too small. Doors and gates are also detail work, judged at arm’s length, and that is the kind of finish Ebenezer means when he says, “Paint to me is an art.”

Read more about wood staining and about the older wood-trimmed homes of San Diego and La Mesa, or ask for a free estimate. Ebenezer will look at the door, its edges and its exposure, and tell you plainly what it needs.