How To Paint A Door - Brush And Roller Edition

Hello again out there, another pro Calgary Painter here and this How To Paint A Door - Brush & Roller blog post on our low cost Cheap Calgary Painters internet website. Today we will be covering a fast and easy to way to paint a door. If you need to know how to paint a door this blog post should help get you going the right direction.

How to paint a door, or repaint a door if you prefer. It's in rough shape, and we are going to make it look all beautiful looking again as we provide this customer a full top to bottom Interior Painting finish make over. Professional Door Painting with a brush and a roller or spray painting a door provides high quality and durable Door Painting results. 

All right, so today we're going to be doing door painting So this is the technique, and the tools you'll need for 90, 80, to 90 percent of the doors that you'll be painting. So first I'm going to introduce to you all the tools you need to paint a door you should have present with you. And then show you the technique that you would use for majority of doors. 

This is one of the more complicated doors you'll see, it's usually budgeted for about an hour and 30 minutes to paint a door like this for the first coat. The second coat on anything is usually about seventy percent of the first coat, so the second coat will probably take about you know 60 minutes or so. On some dark color to light color door painting projects three coats, or four coats of paint might be needed. 

So tools we need. Obviously we got our paint, and this this paint is called grand master or grand entrance sorry We got our multi tool for opening our paint can. First thing we'll do is sanding the door and then dusting if off. Just to get it scuffed and clean, up so it's not a crazy smooth type of thing, but it's really to get it scuffed up so that there's a lot of friction so that paint can adhere or stick really well. 

How To Paint A Door With A Roller.

We got a brush, or a duster brush, so we can wipe away and dust away all the dust so that it's nice and clean before we do the actual paint application. In this case we're not going to be taking off the door handles. But sometimes when you have weird cut angles for the doors you'll remove the actual door knob put it to the side so you know which door handle goes onto what door and then you put it back on the door at the end of completing the door painting. Or the next day if possible.

All of your coats of paint should be done above drop cloth always. Don't take any unnecessary risks and try to pull hero and paint a door with no drop cloth. And of course you will need a small, new, clean, and wet rag for wiping up drips and splatters of paint that might fly onto other surfaces as part of the door painting process. Doesn't happen often but it's handy to have a wet rag handy to address drips.

I also have a putty knife. So in case I get paint on the glass, I can always kind of edge it and just like get it off quickly before it dries, or even wrap it. You'll see me doing it if I hit the glass, I'll wrap my rag around the putty knife blade, it and I'll just give the window a scrape with the rag covered putty knife to get paint off of it if I make a small mess.

Of course I also have a paint brush. I have a wiz roller, or a small roller with a new sleeve. This is just to give it a very good coat of paint once you've brushed on the paint and before it dries. You paint a coat on and smooth it out and it gives a really smooth surface for the paint to dry and make your door look new and fresh looking again.

And doors, especially with semi glosses, the more glossy the paint that you're using, the more likely it is to show the imperfections if you have brush strokes. Low sheen paints can help address that particular issue, as can simply thinning down the paint before painting Or you've brushed in different angles any of those kinds of things so you're going to notice that. 

How To Paint A Door Without Removing It.

I'm going to be doing everything very uniform. As Ii move through probably I'll do everything in a downwards direction. This particular paint has a little bit of a gloss. The glossier you paint you get, the more delicate you have to be with the actual direction of everything you are painting. It shows the most blemishes put it that way. Not an issue at all on doors that are in good shape.

Then I've got my tray. And I don't know if you can see it here, but on the ground, I've put out a drop sheet all the way across. And so that my door doesn't move too much, I'll usually put like something behind the door, so that it's not moving. Or I'll have to hold the door. As I found some newspaper, I'm just going to jot it in so the door doesn't move too much. 

So first things in this case. I'm going to do some taping. If you're really good at cutting you can probably skip the taping. But in this case, most of the time, you'll do some taping. I'm going to tape this at the bottom, the weather strip at the bottom of the door. Which is a rubber. Which we won't be painting, and there's kind of a vinyl piece here that's black which will actually look pretty sharp because we're applying a red paint. 

So the red paint will have this black contrast, and I'm just going to tape that as well. Once again you could just cut it if you were really good at it but for demonstration purposes I'm going to tape it. So when I'm taping, I'm really just focusing on the one edge first. And then I'll just roll my tape over, and I like to do it in sections so it's just not too much tape to manage. 

So that looks good. And then I'll just do another section. So maybe two, or three sections of tape. And once again, as you get better, maybe you can do the whole thing in one piece of tape. So get the edge and then I'll roll the tape over underneath. Oh yeah there we go. So as we move on and obviously inspect it's pretty much the next stage which will be sanding in a minute. 

How To Paint A Door Without Brush Marks.

So i'll get the weather strip now. Weather strips are a little easier to cut because it's a big pronounced edge, but we'll do it. Okay so next step sandpaper, rag, brush and we'll give it a scuff sand to clear any dirt, mildew, dust, peeling paint. So you can see it's creating like a roughness, and that'll have a good adherence to the paint. It doesn't have to be like take a long time or anything. 

Like honestly just doing that is a lot, so we'll kind of use the edge here of the paper, and get into these grooves where the paint tends to start peeling most of the time like 10 years later. Yeah that's it. Shouldn't take more than a couple minutes to do your sanding. Then we'll give it a quick brush with the duster brush to get everything nice and clean and dust free. 

So with everything I'm doing, I'm pretty much always moving top to bottom. That goes for everything on any house, but same with doors. Just start in your top section and move your way down clearing dust, painting, whatever it is. Top down. Always. That's it. Okay. So that's all done. So with the five in one, I can open my paint can. 

Just go circular around the paint can lid. Actually because this paint here has sat over the weekend, all right, I don't know good practice, to just give everything a shake before you pop the paint can lid off of the paint can. Be smart and give your paint can lid a wipe with the brush a couple of times to get any excess paint off of the lid. Every drop or brush full of paint costs you money so save the paint.

Okay so the first order that I'm gonna do on this door is I start with the interior stuff here. So I'm going to get all this interior work brush work done first. I'm not going to do that. And then I'll work my way up to the edges. And then I'll want to apply a lot of this paint fairly quickly especially if it's really hot outside or this door is catching a lot of sun.

How To Paint A Door Black.

I'm gonna want to move fairly quickly with rolling it out so that the paint doesn't dry out while we are in the middle of painting it so it can finish up nice. The word is uniformity. The hotter it is, the quicker you better paint, or the better you have to plan out the movement of the door. This stuff you're not going to notice if I painted this at a different time than that nearly as much as if that square is painted 25 minutes different than this one and i forgot to roll it so.

The terms are called feathering. As I move through I'm going to be feathering the door or back rolling the odd spot or tough area. To make sure it kind of like goes from harsh to kind of fades out so that I fade the next section in to the door. So let's get her started here. And really it's just becoming good at cutting these lines. I cut all my edges of the glass first, and then I roll the face. 

Because the face is what's gonna actually show. Be sure to make sure it's got that uniform and consistent looking finish. Okay, so you can see, as I cut that edge, then I cut the other edge, and then the main piece is the front here. I just want to get a nice roll. That's it. So that section is going to have a nice finish at the end. So now I just kind of feather this parts out and then I'll lead into the next section. 

I'll feather in to the next one. So I can drop down here, and I'll do the next one here. So I really go on a big angle, it makes it a lot easier to not hit the glass. So you can see I kind of hit the glass right there so I'll do a quick show of how I would deal with that. Kaboom. Done. Like it never even happened. That's it. Looks good. Some people even just hit the glass, and they just afterwards it hardens and scrapes it.

I don't think it's a good practice. Become good at cutting is the best practice. So that's done. Now I'm just going to apply tiny bit of paint on the front, and then I'll just feather it into the top section. So there we go. So now I'll move to the next ones. So that's all that's done. Okay, all right. So now that we are done, I've done painting all the interior doors. All the interiors. There was a lot. 32 interior doors.

How To Paint A Door With Glass Panels.

I did them hanging, and i did them in sections. Like I cut the edge, and then I whizzed roll the front edge to give a nice uniform look. And I just kind of slowly feather in the sections making sure they don't look inconsistent. I'm not doing too much brush work before I do the rolling. Otherwise it could dry and then it's hard to fix, or if it dries too much you'll have to sand it and fix it all. 

And that has happened. And it does happen, and it sucks. When it happens so yeah base a lot of your behavior switching back from brush to roller, on what's going on with the weather, and how hot it actually is. So you can see today we're in the shade and luckily we have a shade cover. If this door was not in the shade as much as it was i would have to paste the whole thing on. 

When basically where the sun is at any given moment, so I want to go into the shade because the doors just need time to dry. That's my biggest concern, is that sections dry at different rates. So now that this is done, you'll notice I did not cut this edge yet. I left it open. Because you're going to see how I feather that all in. So next section here, I'm going to fill that in right now. 

So this gets right into this little edge nice and thick. And I'm going to do the whole door really quickly, and then right away I'm going to get this feathered, so that I can do the rest of the door. So basically I want there's a lot of paint here. W want to just smooth it all in, and you call that feathering. So I'm going to go right into this edge. I'm going to re-roll the front edge right here. 

Re-roll that part. So see how I do this. This is feathering. And you notice that I'm keeping the whole thing in one direction. So not switch. I can switch this way, but then I have to come back another come back. Go in the same direction as well okay. So now I can get all of this a little bit of an exception on this one little section here. 

How To Paint A Door With Acrylic Paint.

So when I'm seeing paint starting to dry, it gives these a little defined things. I'm going to kind of like just push on it to disrupt it and break it up so that's about right. So that's kind of me making the entry into the face of the door. And now I can just do the same thing. I'm going to break off into sections. So I'm going to do next section. 

I think I'll do is from here to there, so like that top third of the door. So with my brush, I'm going to apply the paint on these side edges. The brush is just a faster way to get the paint onto the door. And I want to get quite a lot of paint onto the door especially because the thinner the layer of paint that I put on, the quicker it dries as well. 

Now this is really just about giving the uniform look, and making sure I end don't just end with like a really harsh end, like that you want to get it feathered out, which means that the paint just spins out into a nice fade, so that when I want to resume I can fade into it again, and it's good. So now roll it out. 

If sometimes a little bit of the cloth or any debris might get stuck in it, or if you do see it, just pick it out with your finger, or with a rag. If it dries into the door, once again we'll have to come back to sand it. Especially with a red glossy paint very hard to fix the uniformity. So it's all about catching everything while it's nice and wet, which does not last long because it dries very fast especially in the summer months.

Then at this base part here, I'm going to feather it out into for the next section of the ease of merging and before things dry too much as well. I noticed I did hit on my little hand, on my little silver part here, a little bit, so I'll get it while it's wet, or I could have taken the plate off, but I think that would have taken me to take off a doorknob and put it back on. 

How To Paint A Door With High Gloss Paint.

It's probably like 15 minutes at least, and most people forget how to put it back on, but if you get good at it, it becomes easy as well. So whichever method you pick for to use more often is okay. Okay cool, hard part is done. I'm gonna do a quick inspection. You do want to be, like I said, kind of quick. 

So if it's kind of half dried, and then I try and fix something the risk is that i could just end up peeling a section off because it's half dried to the door already. So time is of the essence with how you move through the door, and sectioning, and feathering, right. So this is all good. You can see I've feathered this stuff for the most part, and it's not very hot right now and we're in the shade at this time. 

So I can pretty much finish this whole bottom section of this door. I don't want to be switching back and forth between tools all the time, because that it's a waste of time. Whether it's on a door, or in a house, you always want to use your biggest tools first, and use your smallest tools as little as possible. But then I'm weighing that against sun management and heat management. 

So we don't have much sun. So I'm going to finish the door right now. So once again do my cut lines first, just tons of paint, just get it onto the door and I'll deal with everything else after with the roller. Getting into the cracks obviously, way easier with these brushes. So I'll kind of now get it nice, and one direction with the brush okay. 

So feather it into this top section. Sometimes I'll even do these little boxes similar to the method I use up here. Just because you have to change the angle a little bit okay. Step back, have a final inspection, make sure there's not any blotches or runs or anything like that. If there's any additional feathering you need to do so that looks good to me. Cool that is how you paint a door. 

How To Paint A Door Frame.

These are the tools you need. Those are the technique that you will most often be using. Most doors don't have all this. So usually you can do it during like 15-20 minutes. It's just these squares and we'll just do it in four sections. Then you just let it dry. In this case we're just gonna move over to this door right here, and by the time we finish that in an hour this will be dry for another coat.

If you just happen to have multiple doors, like four, or five doors, you can just move around the house moving your equipment and paint, and by the time you get to the next two doors done, then you can come back to the first one. So once you're finished the base door, one thing that people often miss. which you don't always have to do but you'll be able to tell based on what's going on with the door previously is this inner edge. 

And in this case, it's clearly brown, so we want to be changing that color. It's going to look weird when you and most of the time you won't find out until you're long gone and the job's done, the clients paid, and then they call like a week later, like hey you missed the inner part of the door, which is really easy to get. Same idea, we apply with the brush. 

We open the doors. Fully open the door, brush, and then you can cut the edge with the roller. So I'll do that, and then I'll make sure afterwards that I didn't overlap onto my front part of the door. So in which case, I'd have to use the feathering technique again. So I'll definitely have to use the feathering technique. 

I'm basically going to get this front edge, and then just fix my front part of the door first, before I finish the rest of it. Because to get into this groove, I kind of have to hit the front the front part of the door here. Very important. Just like when you're painting in general. Whenever you have a something you've hit that you're just not supposed to, sort of like maybe a wall.

How To Paint A Door With A Brush.

Which you're gonna have to come touch up later anyways, just get it while it's wet. So having your damp rag handy can save the day. Because it becomes way harder to deal with later on once the paint is dry. And you've missed it. So I hit a little bit of this white and I'm just going to wipe it off immediately. 

Cool so the first thing is get re-fix the front part. So you can see it just overlapped a bit so. I'm going to put most of the tension there and just really light on the other side so that there's it and yeah good luck on your doors. When painting doors in white colors, or light colors, you should be expecting to paint in a full three coats of paint to get everything covered. Black to white doors take four coats.

That's all there is to painting most types of doors with a brush and roller. Your other option is to spray paint your doors with a spray painting machine. The friendly and painting efficient Calgary Painters over at 1/2 Price Pro Calgary Painting can likely help you with your interior door painting and your exterior door painting needs and requirements in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Give a call today and get a free price quote today.