Kitchen- Replacing a pantry door
Posted by Wayne
Like the rest of the doors in the house, the pantry door in our kitchen was brown and ugly. My first step in replacing it was to remove the matching brown trim from around the outside of the door. I was a little surprised to find that the builders of the house had sized down the door frame by building out pieces of wood trim to match the size of the pantry door. This inside framing was loose, a result of nails that were too short to hold it to the surrounding framing, but I didn’t really want to go to the trouble of rebuilding it so I carefully left it in place. I would resecure it to the surrounding framing and paint it to match the door before re-trimming the outside.
Before
The brown door consisted of two 12″ folding panels. It was easily removed by lifting it slightly and pulling the pin out of the pivot point on the bottom of the door. Once I had the old door removed, I used two inch nails in my small nail gun to resecure the inside trim to the framing so that it became nice and solid.
I bought a new ‘6 panel’ type pantry door from Home Depot which cost about $30. The door came primed and ready to paint. It was the exact dimensions of the old door, and after I removed it from the packaging it only required installation of the top and bottom pivot points and the rolling spring mounted wheel that rolls along the existing track. These three points were just lightly tapped in to factory drilled holes with a hammer.
I also drilled a hole for a pull handle in the same location as on the old door. I lifted the new door into place and verified that it fit and worked correctly, and then removed it again for painting.
After the first round of painting the inside framing of the pantry I noticed that stains were coming to the surface of the paint. Experience has taught me that if you see stains begin to surface through a paint job no number of additional coats will cover it up (the stain substance will always work its way to the surface). I applied a coat of Killz oil based stain blocker/primer to stop the stain and once it had dried I followed it up with an additional coat of white. The door panels took two light coats of paint (I only needed to paint the fronts).
Once the door and pantry framing had dried, I installed a satin nickel pull handle and lifted the door back onto the track. I’ll still need to trim around the outside of the door, and that is something I will tackle for the whole kitchen at one time.
This was a very easy and cheap upgrade, and it brightened up that side of the kitchen a lot.
After
Total Cost: $35, Total Time: 1.5 hours (with painting)
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