How to give new life to an old interior door

Now on the Internet, on repair sites, they talk a lot about all sorts of alterations of old furniture. I want to share my idea of ​​how you can easily and simply transform, one might even say embellish, an old interior door. We live in an old private house built after the war. Then they built from what could be obtained. All the doors in our house are non-standard, some are made directly from pieces, all are painted with oil paint.

The most common method for transforming such a door is to strip off the old paint with a blowtorch, a special liquid, and then paint it in a different color. This is a very laborious process that requires money, effort (literally) and time. You can, of course, not paint the door after removing the paint, but simply open it with varnish. It will then look as if it was washed in detergent, with whitish spots. But this is not for everybody … Guests may not understand!

My guests also do not understand what the doors in my house are made of. To bring my ideas to life, you need: an old door painted with oil paint in any color; three-layer white napkins; PVA glue; enamel for painting or acrylic paint (desired color).

It is necessary to wash the door with detergent, to put it simply, to degrease the surface (of course, we remove the handles). The door should dry well.
We take ordinary three-layer white napkins. If there is no such color, you can buy the same colored napkins, the two bottom layers are exactly white. Now we cover a small section of the door with a brush with PVA glue and put a napkin on this section. It is very thin, and therefore we very carefully press it to the surface, trying to crumple it with our fingers as picturesquely as possible. This resembles the decoupage technique, but there we don’t need wrinkles on the glued napkin, but here the more of them, the more effective. So, step by step, we glue the entire surface of the door. If somewhere the paper is nevertheless torn, then you just need to tear off a piece from the napkin and stick it on this hole. In general, it is clear that the more wrinkles the paper has, the more beautiful our product will be. We are waiting for the napkins to dry completely and proceed to painting. Can be painted with enamel paints, can be acrylic. We painted our door with enamel paint to look “silver”. The view is amazing! The door looks like it was made of some unusual metal (high-tech room).

Another door was painted with acrylic paint, added pigment, and then opened with a water-based varnish. Of course, acrylic paint is more convenient to work with – it is water-based, odorless, dries quickly, it can be used to make repairs in the house even in winter (no need to open doors and windows for ventilation, as after enamels), brushes are simply washed in water.

But the door is painted with enamel “silver” looks very impressive, and most importantly, no one can understand what it is made of. And financially, it is very cheap, and this is important in our time. I love to surprise my friends and acquaintances with such crafts!