Chris Bacon wrote:
KJR wrote:
Anyone care to explain the properties of a hardwood door which make it
4x better than a knotty pine door ?

Grain. Knots. Relative quality of timber. There're lots of cheap
doors about made from low quality timber, but careful selection
of your door from a rack of polythene covered ones can lead to
some good cheap doors being found.

Careful selection is certainly the key when selecting cheap doors.

I recently replaced all of our old internals with the 4 panel, knotty
pine model from B&Q - £15 each!

It took two trips to select the 6 unwarped/undamaged doors I ended up
with out of a total of around 30-40.

The essential thing with knotty pine is to seal the knots. I painted
one of my doors earlier this year havign forgotten to use bloody
knotting and it's coming through already. All the otehrs are fine.

I even sawed two in half down the long axis and made matching bi-folds.
I needed a few nails to strengthen the cut edge, but they didn't
disintegrate in a pile of pieces as I had anticipated they might.

Personally I found hanging them a piece of ****. The longest job was
painting. There's a lot of sruface area on 6 doors. Stunk the house
out for days.

Of course I've now got all the old original, dipped doors in the garage
that I don't know what to do with. The ruthless part of me says chuck
them in the wood skip at the dump, but another part of me thinks that
someone with an old house and more patience may want to restores them
lovingly.

--
Steve F