I own a New York apartment in a 1929 building, which has original interior doors. They are all solid hardwood doors with a single recessed panel in the center. They have original hardware with glass knobs.
In the ensuing decades, the doors have been covered with innumerable layers of paint. Sometimes, chunks of paint will chip off, leading to interesting archaeological about the choices my predecessors made in paint colors. Also, all of details of the door (and some of the hardware) are buried in the layers of paint.
We are working on having the metal door frames stripped down to the bare metal, and then we’ll paint them so their details will show through.
We’re thinking of sending the doors out to be stripped. We’ve gotten prices from Park Slope Paint Strippers, which seem quite reasonable, and they’ll pick up and drop off for free. We’ll have to take off the hardware, but that won’t be much of a problem.
One minor wrinkle is that one closet door has a full-length mirror set into the center panel. The mirror is old, and the silvering has worn away partly, so we may want to have that replaced.
Another wrinkle is that we’d like to replace the panel in one of the doors with either clear or frosted glass to let some light into a small room. I haven’t seen if the strippers can do this, if we can get someone to do this with our existing door, or if we’ll have to get a new door (which I would like to avoid, if possible).
So, does anyone have any experience in or thoughts about stripping pre-War hardwood interior doors?