![]() Then, he puts the door in a strip tank to remove all old paint and he sends the hardware out to be polished. He almost always removes the door he is working on and puts up a temporary barricade. ![]() Learnard specializes in historic restoration and typically works on 100-plus-year-old homes. John Learnard of Coloralchemist in Arlington takes a bit of a different approach. Linkins charges around $600 for his craft, not including materials. He also creates a temporary tent around the door to keep dust and debris away. ![]() ![]() Rather than remove the door, he removes only the weather stripping, which leaves a quarter-inch gap around the door, enough to close it between coats of paint. In a perfect world, Linkins says, he would remove the door from its hinges, strip it and paint it horizontally across two sawhorses and then let it dry vertically, but 99 percent of the doors he paints are already installed. Linkins typically applies five thin layers of paint or a minimum of three if he uses a tinted primer. Building up the mirror-like finish takes layers. The door then gets painted with several coats of paint (Linkins uses Fine Paints of Europe’s Hollandlac Brilliant Enamel), polishing between coats, but not after the final coat. Once dry, the door gets skim-coated with Swedish Putty, an oil-based high-performance spackle, which then gets sanded with a fine-grit paper (220 or finer) until the surface shines like a sheet of glass. The process involves first rough-sanding the door then priming it with an oil primer. Linkins uses only oil-based paints (his favorite are those from Fine Paints of Europe, Fine Paints of Europe and he typically spends about five days working on a door (12-18 hours of labor, the rest is drying time between layers). It takes patience, skill and the best materials available. It’s not just the color, but also the mirror-like finish that gives Linkins’s doors what he calls their “wow factor.” Such a lacquered sheen is not easy to achieve. “I have one client who calls me every other year to change the color of her front door,” he says. Linkins, who paints entire houses (both interior and exterior), is often contacted to repaint front doors only. My search led me straight to the streets of Georgetown, where colorful, glossy front doors are plentiful, many of them painted by Eric Linkins of Linkins Custom Painting. Given that the door is about to close on the exterior painting season in the Northeast, I set out to uncover the secrets of the shiny portal.Ī door painted by Eric Linkins. I understand their wishes: A front door is the first thing people see when they approach your house and, in some cases, it is the only thing they see, so one wants it to look good. Both my friend and my client were deflated each hoped that her front door would stand out and be the crown jewel of her house’s facade. My client also wanted a colorful, shiny door, but ended up with a lackluster result. She explained that she had wanted a high-gloss royal blue front door, like the ones you see in Paris or London, but despite buying the best materials possible, her painter was not skilled enough to achieve such a lofty goal.Ĭoincidentally, I told her, I was having a similar problem with a client’s front door. Although her bathrooms were beautifully tiled, her kitchen was in full working order and her floors were newly sanded and stained, her front door looked like a toddler had painted it - it was a patchwork of splotchy blue strokes, some muddy and dull, others glossy and bright with areas of natural wood poking through. After an almost year-long renovation, she and her family were finally moving in. The other day I dropped off a housewarming gift at a friend’s new house.
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