Best Finish for Exterior Wood Doors; Stain and Strip

Best Finish for Exterior Wood Doors; Stain and Strip - Today I'm going to show you how to paint a door. This particular one right here is an exterior door obviously and it's got a factory coat of primer on it, it's a metal door by the way These kinds of projects are very, very easy to do and yet, it's still a project that I see people screw up all the time. and the way that it's screwed up is that people just simply don't prep it right and prep is very, very important on one of these things It's really important on every job, but even more so on a job like this believe it or not and the reason being is because a door is something that is handled on its surface all the time by a lot of different people and if you don't prep it right, you will be able to go though after this is all done with your brand new paint on here, and you will be able to take your finger nail and go like this and it will come off that easy.  So prep is extremely important on one of these guys, so prep is extremely important on one of these guys and I'm going to show you how to do that and then how to finish it to make it look like. Everything else that's already here, so let's go ahead and get started.

Alright, top finish for an exterior wood door first thing I did is I went ahead and just took off all the hardware you'll actually see a lot of painters, more probably than not that will just leave the hardware on there and they will actually just tape around this and paint the door as it is. I don't like to do that. this takes about, you know it took me, a minute to take it off, literally it's very, very ease to take off. It's very very easy to put on. why not take it off, that way I get paint behind here and should this thing shift, or something like that, and there's like a white edge here. this door is actually going to be dark blue so if I saw a white edge around here because I didn't take this thing off and something happened. It just doesn't look as good, so why not just take this off and then you have no chance of getting paint on this or anything like that so I think it's a really good idea. and then just put the hardware back together on here that's a really good trick, so that way you're not loosing screws or anything like that then we are going to need to sand the door this right here is 220 grit sandpaper. I picked a nice fine grade sandpaper because this is a metal door and this is kind of a fine surface.

The heavier grit you go, say you go down to 150 grit or something like that that's going to be a courser grade sandpaper refinishing damaged wood exterior doors you are going to see more scratch marks in this, and I just didn't want to see that so I got a fairly fine grade sandpaper here the way this sandpaper comes is it comes in a sheet like this you know it's one sheet, and then I just rip it in half like that put it together and tri fold it and you got your piece of sand paper in a nice tight package like that and you are going to want to go though and sand the door down now you are going to want to go though and you want to sand it and that's good enough for that section right there alright I went though and I sanded this whole door down now the next thing that we need to do is actually more important than the sanding is we need to go though and we need to wash the door we are going to do that and we are going to wash it down with trisodium phosphate Trisodium is one of those things that there is no brand that is probably any better than any other.