New internal doors can totally transform your home, but they need a bit of care and attention to keep them looking their best for years to come and to keep their value. If you don’t look after your doors you can quickly ruin their aesthetic appeal and functionality, which will cost you more in the long run to fix or replace. Find out the most common ways you’ll ruin your internal doors accidentally, to ensure you avoid making these mistakes.
Treating your doors
If you decide that paint grade doors are the right choice for you because you plan to varnish them once they’re installed, then make sure you do this soon after. If you leave it too long to treat your doors, they will just end up scuffed, dirty or damaged – the paint and varnish protects them and makes them easier to clean, so make time to do this or regret the ugly marks left on your door. When treating your doors, don’t forget to pay attention to the handles and hinges – trying to get gloss paint off your door handles can leave them looking smudged and stained.
Not hanging properly
Hanging your new doors can be a tricky process, so it’s best to use the services of a joiner to ensure it’s done right, otherwise it’s very easy to ruin your new internal doors by over-tightening the screws, not making the door level, or hanging them in ill-fitting frames. If your door isn’t hung correctly, it could scrape the frames, never stay shut or refuse to close – all very frustrating if you’ve just spent a lot of money updating your home interior with new internal doors.
Not treating them correctly when they swell
In the summer when it’s warmer, or when it’s particularly humid, your doors can swell, as they are a natural material, and they absorb moisture in the air around them. If you decide to try and trim the doors to make them fit the frames properly, and they shrink back to regular size when the seasons change, you could be left with draughty gaps and unsightly spaces around your frames. There are other ways to treat your doors if they stick – check out one of our previous blog posts for some advice on managing this.
Scratches and scrapes
If you’ve decided to update your internal doors as part of a bigger renovation project at home, then be careful that you don’t damage them when carrying out the rest of your restoration or decorating work. Even moving furniture in and out of rooms if you are painting or laying new flooring can cause potential damage if you accidentally scrape your doors against them. Our advice would be to cover your doors with dust sheets to protect them as much as possible while you finish the rest of your redecoration.
Changing your door handles
We’ve seen interior design bloggers suggest that an easy way to update your home interior for less is to update things like your cupboard and drawer handles and change your door handles for newer designs, rather than updating your whole door. We would advise that you approach this idea with caution – if you remove your current handles and fit new ones of a totally different shape and size, you might find that there are indentations, visible screw holes and old paint colours lurking underneath that you didn’t know about that can totally ruin the look of your internal doors.