Door Painting and Refinishing in Vancouver

Two things change, and the paint is only one of them.

Exterior doors take direct weather and UV, so they get coatings built for it - Sikkens ProLuxe Rubbol Solid where a solid-body finish suits the wood, or Benjamin Moore Aura exterior in a satin trim sheen. Interior doors and casings usually get a waterborne alkyd in satin. It levels out like traditional oil and cures hard enough for a door that gets handled every day, without the odour and VOCs of the old alkyds.

The second difference matters more, and almost nobody asks about it: the top and bottom edges. A door drinks water through unfinished end grain, then swells, sticks, and starts rotting from the inside out. On exterior doors we seal the top and bottom edges as part of the job. Most of the doors we take off have never been coated there.

It is the single most common reason a door repaint fails.

If the existing coating is an old oil-based paint and a waterborne finish goes straight over it, the two will not bond. It looks right for a season, then lets go in sheets, usually through the first wet spring. When we find oil underneath, the door and jamb get primed with an enamel undercoat first so the new finish has something to grip.

We check rather than guess. If the answer is not obvious we will tell you before we quote, because it changes the preparation and therefore the price.

If the house went up before 1990, assume there is lead in the older coatings until something proves otherwise. Canada did not tighten the consumer limit to 90 ppm until 2010, and paint sold for decades before that carried far more. A door is the worst case: a surface repainted many times over, and a job that involves sanding it.

So we sand on dust extraction rather than dry-sanding into the room, sheet and contain the work area, and HEPA-vacuum before we leave. Our crews carry lead-safe work practice training, and it is the same method whether or not anyone has tested the paint.

If you want certainty instead of precaution, testing before we start is straightforward, and we will tell you plainly what a positive result changes about the scope and the cost.

It depends whether it is a repaint or a strip.

A door in sound condition is usually one to two days of on-site work. What sets the pace is not us, it is the recoat window on the manufacturer's data sheet. Force a second coat on early and you get a soft film that prints, blocks against the jamb, and marks the first warm afternoon somebody leans on it.

Stripping back to bare wood is a different job. On a heritage six-lite fir entry door in Kitsilano this past summer, first sanding to final coat ran about a week - sanded in place on dust extraction so the house stayed liveable, then stripped, primed and finished, with the original mail slot and mortise lock kept.

On spraying: cabinet doors and drawer fronts come off their hinges and are sprayed in a controlled space, which is the right way to get a factory-flat finish on a flat panel. Entry doors, jambs and casings we brush and roll, with a 2½ or 3 inch Purdy. On a panelled or heritage door you want the coating worked into the profile and the joints, not laid across the top of them.

Yes. Alongside houses we work on strata buildings and commercial properties across Vancouver and the Lower Mainland - lobbies, corridors, amenity rooms, entry doors and the common-area trim that goes with them.

High-traffic entryways get specified differently from a family front door: harder-wearing enamels, and scheduling that keeps a lobby or corridor usable while we are working in it. Strata jobs are staged around resident access, and we agree that sequence with your property manager or council before anyone starts.

The three tiers on this page come down to one thing: what condition the door is in when we get there. A sound door needs cleaning, light sanding and coating. A weathered one needs stripping, filling and rebuilding of failed sections before any finish goes on. That is labour, and labour is most of the number.

An estimate covers labour, materials, rentals, insurance and disposal. Taxes are extra. The finish standard is written into every quote we issue: two coats, free of runs, sags, drips and holidays, prepared and applied to the Master Painters Institute Repainting Manual and the Craftsmanship Operating Procedures set out by the PDCA.

Anything we cannot price until we open it up is named in the quote rather than buried in it. You get a firm number after an on-site look, not over the phone.

We fix doors as well as paint them. Bifold doors that will not run, screen doors, sagging jambs, rot at the bottom rail - that is ordinary work for us, and because our carpenters and painters are the same company you are not waiting on a second trade to show up.

When a door is past saving we quote the labour to remove and replace it, and carry the door itself as an allowance, meaning a budgeted figure. Door costs vary enormously by type, and an allowance keeps that visible in the quote instead of hidden inside a lump sum. Once you have chosen the door, the allowance is trued up to what it actually cost.

Yes, and most people should. A freshly painted door against tired casing just draws the eye to the casing.

We scope doors, door frames, casings and sills as separate surfaces so nothing gets missed, and we match sheen and colour across the door, the casing and the baseboard so the transition looks deliberate. If the casing itself is damaged or dated we can replace it first - on one interior job we pulled the old casings and installed new ½ by 2½ inch stock before any painting started.