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Prepare Doors and Area for Initial Spray

1:37
26:33
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Door Painting Hacks for New Construction Interiors

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What happens here

Before beginning the spraying process, it's crucial to thoroughly prepare both the doors and the surrounding area. This involves sanding the doors to ensure a smooth surface for painting. For pre-primed doors, particularly those with a rough eggshell texture, a 150-grit abrasive is used to flatten them. For better primed doors, a 220 or 320-grit sandpaper would suffice. After sanding, use a shop vac to remove all dust from the doors and the entire floor area. Finally, wipe down the doors with a microfiber cloth to catch any remaining fine dust particles. Elevate the doors slightly using stir sticks to prevent paint from bridging between the door bottom and the floor.

Goal: Ensure a clean, smooth surface for painting and prevent floor contamination.

Tools and materials

  • Microfiber Cloth — Wiping down doors to remove fine dust
  • Sander — Sanding the doors to a smooth finish
  • Sandpaper — Aggressively sanding poorly primed or rough doors
  • Shop Vac — Vacuuming dust from doors and the floor
  • Stir Sticks — Elevating doors off the floor to prevent paint bridging

What they say

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They'll take stir sticks. They'll take pieces of trim. There's a lot of different options. And that's, you know, standing doors up. The foam pro ones I did for quite a few years. They're plastic. What you don't want to do is set them outside. Once again, you know, um, from my personal experience, today's a windy day. We were working on the house. We set them up outside and, uh, they blew over after I sprayed them. Complete disaster. So, don't stand doors up outside. You can do them stand them up in a garage, you know, drop cloths, uh, paper down, you know, to protect things. So, uh, I stand them up in kind of like in an accordion fashion like this. I like to be able to walk in and out of them, spray. This is very convenient. The house is, uh, just PVA primed. I showed some um videos of this, you know, on social media recently and people are saying, "Oh my gosh, you're getting overspray on the roof, on the ceiling, and it's only PVA primed. It doesn't matter where you get overspray anywhere you get. Um doesn't matter getting overspray on the floor cuz just like the ceiling, uh the floor is going to be covered with tile, um LVP or carpet, something is going to be covering this subfloor." Another thing, you know, somebody had talked about, you know, and commented on is as I'm spraying these doors, they're like, you know, overspray is falling on the other doors. Now, when you're spraying these doors, as fast as I can spray these doors, um, by the time I do the two at the end and I'm spraying the next two, and if overspray is going up and falling down those doors, they're still sping wet. And the overspray is not going to do anything. It's not going to make it rough. It's not going to cause an issue. If you sprayed the first two doors down there and you went off and did something else, 30 minutes later you came back, those were dry, and you sprayed the next two doors and you're shooting over the top. Uh, yes. Now, overspray could end up being a problem. One person mentioned, you know, why don't you put cardboard shields and screw cardboard shields to the top? You know, you could do that, but then this the the the the paint's going to bridge from your door to the shield when you go to pull it off. You're going to have problems. I've done this method right here for over 25 years, and it absolutely works. Now, this method, standing them up, you'll see down here, I have um the doors sitting on stir sticks. So, from a learning lesson, if you had them sitting on the…

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