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How to paint doors with peeling paint?

The paint on these doors has peeled off when decal stickers were removed. One door is quite bad with a large amount of peeling paint, 4 other doors have a small section of peeling paint.

What is the best way to prepare and repaint these doors - both the door with large amount of peeling and other doors with small patch?

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Dave-1

Good Evening @blodynlisa

Not great news and I am feeling your pain. Its not the stickers but the non prep work whomever painted the doors previously 😕 My interior doors are / where all like that. So far I have done 2 out of 6. By done I mean scrapped and then sanded them back, first with a paint scraper and yeah the paint did flake resonably easily. Then sanded them. I did not want to but knew if I didnt take them back then the paint would keep on flaking even with new paint over the top.

You may have water based paint over oil based paint or the surface wasnt prepped right. It dosnt really make a lot of dfference as when you remove the flaking paint and then sanding yiur will restore the surface to be able to take the paint.

I would suggest to remove the doors before sanding. It may make it easier to work on. I did leave my doors insitu and believe me my arm muscles were screaming by the end of the removal 🙂

Dave

JacobZ

Hi @blodynlisa,

Unfortunately, as @Dave-1 has already alluded to, you will need to remove the existing paint from your doors to repaint them.

This is because it does not appear to have been primed before the previous paint application. Without primer, paint struggles to stick to smooth surfaces like the face of a door. Unfortunately, if you were to paint over the top, you would have new paint sticking to old paint, which is not really sticking to the door. This means that over time, as things expand, contract and move around, the old paint will continue to peel and flake underneath the new layer of paint, which will in turn do the same thing, and eventually flake off as it has with the current layer of paint. The solution is to remove the existing paint, prime the doors, and then repaint them.

To remove the paint, start by taking the door off the hinges and then removing the door handle. As it is already flaking off, you will be able to use paint scraper such as this 100mm Sharp Edge Paint Scraper to remove the majority of the paint. Once the majority of the paint has been removed with your scraper, you can tidy up any remaining paint by sanding with 120-grit sandpaper.

When you are back to a clean surface to work with, you can use How To Paint a Door as a guide.

Once the door has been painted, reinstall the hardware and rehang the door using the existing screw holes.

Let me know what you think, and if you have further questions or require clarification, please don't hesitate to ask.

Jacob

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