Trim and Door Enamel

Trim Is Judged From Two Feet Away

Walls get looked at from across a room. Trim gets looked at from the width of a hallway, and a front door gets looked at while somebody stands waiting for you to answer it. That difference is the whole reason trim and door work is priced the way it is, and the reason we brush most of it rather than spray.

On a 1910s bungalow the casings, the plinth blocks, the picture rail and the window aprons are usually the original wood carrying eight or ten layers of paint. Some of those layers were brushed well, some were laid on thick and left with runs, and one of them, on nearly every house of that age, has gone brittle underneath everything else. A new coat over the top of that inherits all of it.

What We Do Before the Enamel

Sanding is the bulk of it. Not sanding to bare wood, which on pre-1978 paint would be the wrong thing to do anyway, but sanding the profile back until the arrises are crisp again and the old runs no longer stand proud. Curved profiles get worked by hand because a machine flattens the detail that makes the trim worth keeping.

Then the joints. A miter that has opened, a casing that has parted from the plaster, the gap along a baseboard top: these get filled or caulked and tooled with a wet finger, and the excess cut back rather than left as a fat bead. A heavy caulk line is the single most obvious sign that a trim job was rushed, because the enamel sheen shows every ripple in it.

Knots, old water marks and tannin bleed get spot sealed with a primer chosen for the stain. A water mark under a windowsill needs a stain blocking primer; a glossy old alkyd surface needs a bonding primer so the new film has something to key into. These are not interchangeable and an extra coat of finish paint is not a substitute for either.

Choosing the Film

Trim wants a harder, more level film than a wall does. Waterborne alkyd enamels flow out well, cure hard, and hold up on a door edge that gets pushed with a hand a hundred times a day. Straight acrylics stay more flexible, which matters on exterior trim that moves with the temperature. We pick based on where the piece is and what the wood is doing, and we tell you which one is going on.

Sheen is the other decision. Satin hides more of an old surface and is forgiving on hundred year old woodwork. Semi gloss is easier to wipe down and shows more. Gloss looks superb on a front door and is unforgiving everywhere else. On an older house the honest advice is usually to go one step down the ladder from what people first ask for.

Doors

Hardware comes off, not masked. Hinges, plates, knobs, letter plate, all of it. A door painted around its hardware is obvious for the rest of its life. Panel doors get the panels first, then the muntins and rails, then the stiles, so that overlaps land in the direction of the grain rather than across it. Top and bottom edges get coated, which is the step that keeps a door from swelling in the first wet week of the year.

Dry time and cure time are different things. A door can be dry to touch in a couple of hours and still soft enough to stick to its stop overnight. We hang doors back with the film given proper time, and where a job runs tight we would rather leave a door off its latch for a night than hand back one that pulls its paint off the stop in the morning.

Call (626) 427-2021 and describe the room or the door. We are happy to quote a single door as a way of showing you the finish before you commit to a whole house of trim.