How We Are Restoring Our Vintage Doors + Splurging On Some Special Salvaged Doors

Today’s post is for the real design enthusiasts – as not everyone is as interested in doors as we might be. But boy does a good door make a subtle but strong impact. So when we bought the farmhouse we went through it with an eye for what could be refreshed not replaced – and there wasn’t as much as you’d think, but the doors on the second floor were wonderful five-panel solid ladies, so we started there. But once I started shopping for vintage doors to supplement I was HOOKED and wanted every door to be “special” which was quickly reigned in by Brian (seriously, thank god for that guy being so involved in this project). So today I’ll show you how we are rescuing the vintage doors and salvaging others to make the house feel special.

The Original Lead-Filled Doors

Those vintage five-panel doors were great and solid, but the paint was falling off and technically full of lead. So the ARCIFORM team pulled them off and stored them in hopes of us wanting to reuse them.

The original upstairs layout looked like this…with 4 doors opening into the second floor landing.

This is the layout now…

With the new layout, we needed 7 more doors upstairs…we wanted them to play nicely with the originals and the style of the house which meant we needed to go vintage…first stop was Aurora Mills.

Shopping For Doors At Aurora Mills

Aurora Mills is my happy place…the excitement, the thrill of the potential find feeds my soul. They have an abundance of REALLY special salvaged doors and we are ecstatic with what we found.

We shopped for these in February 2021 – almost literally a year and a half ago hahaha!!! Funny not funny! ARE WE STILL SAYING THAT??!! Aurora Mills (as well as other salvaged stores in the city) have rows of old doors. They are for this exact type of project – an older home that can handle (or needs) the age and character that vintage doors can bring. They sell from anywhere from $80 – $800 each, each PAIR of ours were between $300-$400 (I forget the exact price either because it’s been so long).

We added a laundry closet upstairs, so instead of getting new five-panel doors, we found a pair of these guys (they are red on one side and blue on the other as you’ll see down further).

This pair will go downstairs one to the family room as a pocket door and the other to the mudroom…I imagine peeking through the windows to check on the dogs as they lounge on the warm floors in the Mudroom after a bath…eeek so excited!

Salvaged Doors at Arciform

So in addition to the statement doors from Aurora Mills we also needed some other closet doors to match our five-panel doors for the upstairs, so ARCIFORM found a few at an auction.

I didn’t know that Stephyn had found these doors, so I went for a visit to the ARCIFORM warehouse to see them for myself. Some of them are abnormal sizes which we had to decide whether that was a good thing or a bad thing – the bathroom door was only 24″ wide (which is so sweet, but let’s just say not ADA compliant) and the kids closet doors are shorter. We ultimately decided that this would be fun and cute. Also, they were done and signed off on for framing so we’d have to re-source them all and then reframe. The ARCIFORM team found these at GREAT prices – I think they were all under $100, some as low as $60 (from my memory).

We added double doors to all the closets upstairs so we had to find pairs. Again, these are hilariously small, only 6′ tall but absolutely perfect and quirky for a kid’s closet and I smile every time I see them.

The rest of the closet doors didn’t match perfectly but they were five-panel and solid, so we are into them.

Now The Hard Part…Time To Refurbish Them!

The vintage/salvaged doors needed repair…holes filled, damaged pieces replaced, and everything sanded to be ready for paint.

So while the cost of a door this special is much cheaper than new doors, the refurbishment is still time-consuming and laborious. I’d estimate (based on nothing) that it took about 3-4 hours to restore each door, at $90/hour so that gives you an idea of what you might be in for). If you are handy this might be something you can do yourself, too. These guys are pros so they knew exactly how to do it and even had to replace some of the trim work and wood details.

Where We Are Now – Installed and Ready to Paint

The new laundry closet doors look great and will be EVEN better when they are painted (the inside is the painted red you saw above). Again, although the doors are salvaged and cost about $300 each, it is important to always account for the cost of labor to get salvaged doors in tip-top shape if you go in this direction. We love how unique they feel they are definitely the focal point of the upstairs landing at this point…let’s see if they can hold that title after the floor is painted! We are actually planning on color matching that blue color because we love it so much.

In case you forgot, the landing used to look like this…

Can’t wait for everything to be painted!

This is the narrow door we had modified to become a pocket door for the guest bath, it is so sweet and wee and allowed for wall space in the room for a piece of art or a little moment. We plan on painting it one color on one side, another on the bedroom side.

Here ARCIFORM used a couple of the original closet doors to create a pair in one kid’s room and they look GREAT. We are actually using all of the original hardware on these, too.

These are the “mini” ones… which makes us smile/laugh. It might bug people that they are shorter and that the casings don’t line up – and I’m not sure it bugs me, yet, and if it does it’s frankly not my room (it’ll be one of the kids – unsure yet) so I’ll be able to easily ignore it.

The doors I’m most excited about (along with the laundry closet doors upstairs) are these two pocket doors – the mud room here and the matching family room/living room pocket door.

A huge thanks to Jamie and the ARCIFORM team for managing all these moving doors – it’s so much easier to scrap and buy all new – to not deal with the idiosyncrasies of older doors with weird widths, trying to get them to match, odd sizes, etc. But I think it’s worth it in the end to have this soul and charm injected back into the house. Now to choose paint. Coming at you asap…

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from Emily Henderson https://stylebyemilyhenderson.com/blog/vintage-or-salvaged-farmhouse-doors