Absolutley beautiful. Who in their right mind would paint over that?!

Wonderful grain!

Amen! DON'T PAINT! We are also stripping select pieces....not enough money/time for all.

Your wood looks amazing!

Your door is beautiful. What a shame someone painted it.

Beautiful door, it's a work of art. Thanks for emphasizing the importance of researching before making changes. My old home is from a period when woodwork was either painted or faux stone painted. Is that floor original too?

That is a gorgeous door!!!

Thanks everyone!

Thanks everyone!

The floor in the photo is from the last 20 years. It's an alternating absolute black granite and nero marquina marble pattern (our issues with getting it re-polished are the subject of another topic). I'm not sure what it replaced, but since it is in the kitchen, foyer, main floor bath, and breakfast room, likely multiple materials. Elsewhere in the house we have an original red quary tile floor that may have been in some of these spaces.

Another interesting find, someone did some research for us and pulled up this on our doors:

Apparently the Paine Lumber Company of Wisconsin was one of the first to produce a veneered engineered flat panel wood door. The center panel is veneered over plywood allowing it to be much thinner than prior door center panels and the styles and rails were done in several layers of locking jointed hardwood for better door stability. They were popular from roughly 1910 into the 1930s. A catalogue from 1923 is here:

https://archive.org/details/PaineLumberCompanyLtd.

Gorgeous!

It looks really lovely and I'm so glad you were able to restore it.

Have you given any thought to DIYing it? I am not particularly handy but I am finding that wood refinishing is more of a messy craft project than anything else. It doesn't cost a ton (tools needed, heat gun, sander) and while it is time consuming, if you tire of it, you can just stop and pick up later.

I am stripping, sanding, restaining, and refinishing ours too. What makes me so angry is our woodwork wasn't painted, rather they stripped and re-stained it a sickly blonde color (an original untouched door was left in the attic) ;(

I totally agree with doing what you can in the space and triaging what you can handle - I am doing our windows first, as a matter of getting them all functioning and preserved. And then I will go from there.

I agree with kats - I'd try doing it myself.

I've had good luck with a product called CitriStrip. It is not as nasty to work with as a lot of chemical strippers, and it works REALLY well. I would definitely try it (maybe on a door that you don't see all time), to see if you are willing to do the work and satisfied with the results. If you have several layers of paint, you might have to coat with CitriStrip more than once. The secret to using this product is to apply it more like frosting than paint, cover the entire piece with plastic to keep it wet, and wait 24 hours before starting to scrape off the stripper and old finish.

After seeing the beauty of this door, I would not be happy until every door in the house looked as good!

>It's hard to believe that anyone looked at that and thought that that white would be better.

No it's not. This forum is littered with people who have homes with beautiful woodwork that either they want to paint white, or are being encouraged to paint white.

I can second the recommendation on Citri-strip. It works pretty well. But don't cover it. I've found it works much better if not covered. It stays wet very well on it's own.

Sam - I agree it's sad to see originally stained woodwork painted but do remember that styles were cyclical. My home is much older and from a time when woodwork was either painted white or as faux stone. There are a number of historically accurate houses of the same period here to use as examples.

I do need to strip a large amount of paint to recover the details from many paint layers and want to use something like the "silent paint remover", it's infrared.

The door reveal is amazing- GORGEOUS!!!!