# Sealing tops and bottoms of interior doors.



## Nsomepaint (Sep 16, 2017)

On new construction jobs do you seal all six sides of the interior doors? All the doors I've seen say (typically on the top of door) they must be sealed or void warranty.


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## Joe67 (Aug 12, 2016)

I never have. So I'd imagine I've voided a lot of warranties.



Seems weird to me. If the manufacturer deems that top/bottom sealing is necessary to the long term integrity of the door, then it should be sent sealed up by the manufacturer. 



So I'm calling B.S. - a lot of warranty "promises" are B.S. lip service where the "fine print" voids virtually all of them.


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## Wildbill7145 (Apr 30, 2014)

Once. Wood door. Warranty required priming whole door with oil primer. Twice. First coat thinned 10%, second coat straight up. Very expensive doors.


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## finishesbykevyn (Apr 14, 2010)

Nsomepaint said:


> On new construction jobs do you seal all six sides of the interior doors? All the doors I've seen say (typically on the top of door) they must be sealed or void warranty.


I would consider it on an exterior door. But I concour it should be done at the factory..


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## cardgunner (Feb 29, 2016)

Maybe because doors sometimes need to be cut down to fit over carpet and such? Maybe that is why they don't seal from the factory. Just a guess.


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## RH (Sep 7, 2010)

Always felt those recommendations to do all six sides were a CYA item.


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## MikeCalifornia (Aug 26, 2012)

I do see some of the mdf faux grain doors swell at the bottom when they are in bathrooms sometimes. I never look, but Im sure they are not sealed. I guess a coat of clear poly would be the easiest to do.


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## Redux (Oct 27, 2018)

I’ve worked with 2 custom door manufacturers that not only seal the door-tops & bottoms during the manufacturing process, but seal “all” 6 sides with sanding sealer for warranty purposes, the sealer needing to be stripped & removed in its entirety after delivery. 

The fist time I encountered it I had priced out 88 white oak doors from drawings, sight-unseen, yet wasn’t informed that they were going to be sealed and hadn’t figured stripping into my budget which ended up costing well over $15K (that project ended up going t&m).

I always seal and finish the tops and bottoms w/the exception of the sometimes heavier units if they’re installed beforehand, some of the doors weighing in at well over a half-ton. When working for my father as a kid he’d check the bottoms of the doors by sliding a piece of mirror-glass beneath the hung doors making certain that no-one on his crew was cutting corners.


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## ParamountPaint (Aug 25, 2016)

It's good practice, sealing tops and bottoms. In real life, I'd bet you could skip it 98% of the time without consequence. That 2% chance nicked me once on some solid core hardwood doors, so I'll generally seal them up now.

I'm not going out of my way on cheap, pressed Masonite hollow cores. That warranty isn't going to help anyway.

What are they going to do? Give you another cheap hollow core slab to install..

Probably cost them $5.


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## ParamountPaint (Aug 25, 2016)

Redux said:


> I’ve worked with 2 custom door manufacturers that not only seal the door-tops & bottoms during the manufacturing process, but seal “all” 6 sides with sanding sealer for warranty purposes, the sealer needing to be stripped & removed in its entirety after delivery.
> 
> The fist time I encountered it I had priced out 88 white oak doors from drawings, sight-unseen, yet wasn’t informed that they were going to be sealed and hadn’t figured stripping into my budget which ended up costing well over $15K (that project ended up going t&m).
> 
> I always seal and finish the tops and bottoms w/the exception of the sometimes heavier units if they’re installed beforehand, some of the doors weighing in at well over a half-ton. When working for my father as a kid he’d check the bottoms of the doors by sliding a piece of mirror-glass beneath the hung doors making certain that no-one on his crew was cutting corners.


1000lb door? I'm not taking a position against your position, but 1000lb door?


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## Redux (Oct 27, 2018)

ParamountPaint said:


> 1000lb door? I'm not taking a position against your position, but 1000lb door?


Many of the lift & slide door panels I finish weigh well over 1,000 #s...Just the IGU for the one 12’ door panel pictured weighs over 1,100 #s. All totaled I think the individual door panels weighed 1,400 #s. In order to seal and finish the overlays, tops, and bottoms, the door panels need to be removed. So yeah, the half-ton statement is accurate.


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## DeanV (Apr 18, 2007)

We try to always spray primer on tops and bottoms before we set up doors up to spray vertically. This works well for painted doors. You cannot really do that with stained doors since you run the risk of the finish on the top and bottom getting on the faces enough to affect stain. I try to seal the tops and bottoms on stained doors after they finished with a paint pad, but it is tough to get a good coat on the bottom edge.
@Redux That is crazy to have sanding sealer on news doors that needs to be stripped off to finish. Nightmare scenario!


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## finishesbykevyn (Apr 14, 2010)

Redux said:


> I’ve worked with 2 custom door manufacturers that not only seal the door-tops & bottoms during the manufacturing process, but seal “all” 6 sides with sanding sealer for warranty purposes, the sealer needing to be stripped & removed in its entirety after delivery.
> 
> The fist time I encountered it I had priced out 88 white oak doors from drawings, sight-unseen, yet wasn’t informed that they were going to be sealed and hadn’t figured stripping into my budget which ended up costing well over $15K (that project ended up going t&m).
> 
> I always seal and finish the tops and bottoms w/the exception of the sometimes heavier units if they’re installed beforehand, some of the doors weighing in at well over a half-ton. When working for my father as a kid he’d check the bottoms of the doors by sliding a piece of mirror-glass beneath the hung doors making certain that no-one on his crew was cutting corners.


Curious. Why would you have to strip the sanding sealer off?


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## Redux (Oct 27, 2018)

finishesbykevyn said:


> Curious. Why would you have to strip the sanding sealer off?


That’s the same question the manufacturer asked me.

The reason being is that I primarily use chemical reagents and dyes for coloring wood which only work on unsealed wood, not obscuring the figure. I also primarily use drying oils and hard oil sealers to pop the color and seal the wood which won’t work over a previously sealed surface. Both door manufacturers have made exceptions to their policy for not letting anything leave their shops unsealed on subsequent projects I’ve done after raising a stink about the added expense for removing the sealer. 

The door surfaces only accounted for 5% of the oak in the home, so in order to devise a technique for the doors and not strip them, the balance of wood in the home would have needed to be sealed as well, and treated the same.


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## Redux (Oct 27, 2018)

DeanV said:


> We try to always spray primer on tops and bottoms before we set up doors up to spray vertically. This works well for painted doors. You cannot really do that with stained doors since you run the risk of the finish on the top and bottom getting on the faces enough to affect stain. I try to seal the tops and bottoms on stained doors after they finished with a paint pad, but it is tough to get a good coat on the bottom edge.
> @Redux That is crazy to have sanding sealer on news doors that needs to be stripped off to finish. Nightmare scenario!


It wasn’t too much of a nightmare because the removal didn’t have to be all that thorough due to having fumed the doors with ammonium hydroxide. The ammonia gas permeated any residual sealer left in the pores and the harder to remove details. 

I had prior knowledge of a technique for darkening sealed white oak utilizing anhydrous ammonium hydroxide. Wood finisher George Frank wrote a piece about it which was published in Fine Woodworking about a color screw up where everything had been finished...rather than having to strip and redo everything, they ended up fuming the finished wood, the ammonia gas penetrating multiple clear coats, darkening the underlying wood to the desired shade.

https://www.finewoodworking.com/2020/03/25/adventures-in-woodworking-fernan-banks-on-ammonia

Pella has a link to photos of the project & doors we did accessible @ their luxury division’s link.


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## cocomonkeynuts (Apr 14, 2017)

Redux said:


> It wasn’t too much of a nightmare because the removal didn’t have to be all that thorough due to having fumed the doors with ammonium hydroxide. The ammonia gas permeated any residual sealer left in the pores and the harder to remove details.
> 
> I had prior knowledge of a technique for darkening sealed white oak utilizing anhydrous ammonium hydroxide. Wood finisher George Frank wrote a piece about it which was published in Fine Woodworking about a color screw up where everything had been finished...rather than having to strip and redo everything, they ended up fuming the finished wood, the ammonia gas penetrating multiple clear coats, darkening the underlying wood to the desired shade.
> 
> ...



reminds me I should experiment more with fuming, I have a mahogany table I am refinishing. thank you.


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## Redux (Oct 27, 2018)

cocomonkeynuts said:


> reminds me I should experiment more with fuming, I have a mahogany table I am refinishing. thank you.


Not to hijack this thread...an option to fuming mahogany which I’ve used is bichromate of potash ...amazing results but dangerous stuff being that it’s a chromium VI containing compound. It can however be reduced to harmless chromium III by first using chromium VI followed by ferrous sulfate aka copperas.


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## ParamountPaint (Aug 25, 2016)

I think that the direction this thread has gone is fascinating. We don't seem to get much stain-grade work, but i know its out there. In my area, we have a lot of timber framed and log homes, but I made an executive decision years ago to move more into kitchen and bath remodels and shuffled most of our paint work to the commercial side.

Stain grade is finicky work and I applaud you folks out there that are doing it. We do some cedar exteriors, but nothing rising to the level of fuming the woodwork.


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## Redux (Oct 27, 2018)

cocomonkeynuts said:


> reminds me I should experiment more with fuming, I have a mahogany table I am refinishing. thank you.


Being I’ve already deviated from the thread topic....

Rather than messing with a fuming container or tent, I’ve also applied ammonium hydroxide directly onto the wood which provides the same results less the penetration depth. Haven’t tried it with mahogany though. It does however experience significant color loss the first few weeks before stabilizing to some degree, yet will continue to fade in time with UV light as would standard fuming. If I were to fume anything again, I might consider a real light pigment wash or colorfast dye after, which would help with the longer term color retention. There’s a good example of extreme color fading @ the following link along with some resources providing insight on the fading with regards to fuming and direct applications.

https://www.woodweb.com/cgi-bin/forums/finishing.pl?read=792843

Below are a couple of photos of direct applications I did on white oak. Just wanted to make note that the board colors on the flooring pictured were all over the charts prior to applying the ammonium hydroxide, having finished 6,000 sq ft of flooring on the home. Gotta suit up with ammonia rated PPE for something of that volume...the fumes will literally knock you on your a$$, almost like smelling salts, and will yellow alkyd resin paints.


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## Brushman4 (Oct 18, 2014)

Nsomepaint said:


> On new construction jobs do you seal all six sides of the interior doors? All the doors I've seen say (typically on the top of door) they must be sealed or void warranty.


Yes you're supposed to seal all the tops and bottoms of doors even though it's a pita!


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## Woodco (Nov 19, 2016)

I dont see why some people think its a big deal to stain the tops and bottoms either. IDK about you guys, but I stain my doors laying on saw horses, so just rub your stain rag on the ends. 

As for paint grade doors, my system is to take them down, and lean them down sideways about four or five worth, and sprya the tops and bottoms, then stand them back up and paint as normal. I will never take a door down just to it though, like some GC's seem to expect us to do. They sell little metal tools with a tiny paint pad on it, you can bend and paint door bottoms with though.


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## gemstone (Apr 15, 2020)

Just as a point of reference, I took all 34 of my 1949 vintage 6 panel pine doors down to as close to bare wood as I could get, none had been sealed top and bottom in 1949, and i saw no need to do it...the doors suffered no ill effects from being unsealed for 70 years. Granted, you'd have to spend some $$$ to get quality doors like that today....maybe that would make a difference.

Regards
Gemstone


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## Redux (Oct 27, 2018)

On the topic of whether to seal doors according to manufacturer’s specs, including the tops and bottoms, I figured I’d share some photos which serve as a prime example of what can happen if doors aren’t sealed according to manufacturer’s specifications within the stated timeframe. 

I took the photos when on a estimate and the doors had been left unsealed well beyond the manufacturer’s specified 2 week timeframe. The client had -zero- recourse due to not having them sealed within 2 weeks after delivery, which was clearly stated in the warranty as well as in the finish spec. There were over 50 custom white oak doors that cost close to $80K which were pretty much toast. Although the manufacturer didn’t provide adequate spacing for the floating panels to expand as much as they did, had they been sealed to spec and it did happen, the manufacturer would have been held accountable. In this case the client was SOL.

I recently had a $5K Burmese teak door which was finished a year ago warp beyond the manufacturer’s tolerances stated in their warranty. The first thing the door rep checked were the tops, bottoms, and mortises to determine who was at fault. Luckily I had sealed everything according to spec, otherwise I’d probably be eating the cost for replacing the door....a big price to pay for skimping on a few minutes’ work.

It’s always important to adhere to the manufacturer’s specifications to CYA, otherwise the onus of replacing the doors can fall on the finisher.


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## RH (Sep 7, 2010)

On new, uninstalled doors, there is really no reason, or excuse, not to finish. On an installed very heavy door, especially an exterior one, it can be a challenge to say the least.

About six years ago my neighbor had a very costly and weighty set of double front doors installed which he asked me to finish ( stain and seal). 

Each door had four glass panels inserted at intervals from near the top of door down and a transom above the doors. The company doing the install had a heck of a time and broke the transom glass three times along with some of the glass door panels while trying to get those behemoths in place.

Knowing that, there was simply no way I was going to mess with removing the doors in order to remove the bottom threshold weather strip and finish the door. The top wasn’t an issue but the bottom getting properly finish just wasn’t going to happen.


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## Respec (Sep 13, 2015)

We always seal tops and bottoms of new doors. It saved our butts once. We did a house and painted some doors in their finished basement. They definitely had a moisture issue. The steel exterior door we painted took a few days to dry. It was unbelievable. Anyways, all the wood interior doors ended up warping and the door company covered it because we had sealed all 6 sides. The general contractor thanked me and was a loyal customer for over 15 years (he retired last year).


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## Woodco (Nov 19, 2016)

RH said:


> On new, uninstalled doors, there is really no reason, or excuse, not to finish. On an installed very heavy door, especially an exterior one, it can be a challenge to say the least.
> 
> About six years ago my neighbor had a very costly and weighty set of double front doors installed which he asked me to finish ( stain and seal).
> 
> ...


Why isnt whoever put the weatherstrip on the bottom of the door responsible for sealing the bottom with something? Thats bull****


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## RH (Sep 7, 2010)

Woodco said:


> Why isnt whoever put the weatherstrip on the bottom of the door responsible for sealing the bottom with something? Thats bull****


Totally agree. This came as one big unit but of course they pulled the doors to install but because the door casing (including the transom) was so big it was easily wrenched out of true which resulted in the glass breaking several times. I really felt sorry for the install guys. I’m sure they had to eat all of the install time since it took so long over multiple tries.


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## Redux (Oct 27, 2018)

RH said:


> Totally agree. This came as one big unit but of course they pulled the doors to install but because the door casing (including the transom) was so big it was easily wrenched out of true which resulted in the glass breaking several times. I really felt sorry for the install guys. I’m sure they had to eat all of the install time since it took so long over multiple tries.


Last year I finished some behemoth glass paneled lift and slide doors by Pella’s Duratherm division which couldn’t be removed by conventional means, at least not by me and my crew. They needed to be removed in order to finish the overlays, tops, bottoms, as well as parts of the headers and sills, much of which was visible when the doors were in the open position. The door manufacturer offered to ship and loan me their mechanized vacuum lift which they use to install or remove heavy glass panel doors for servicing. It’s sort of like a forklift with a vacuum suction cup attachment instead of forks. Having been banged by their sister company for a broken $2,600 IGU glass panel replacement only half the size a couple of years earlier, I said thanks but no thanks...I’m a finisher, not an installer. Not worth the risk of having a glass panel break or someone getting injured, or possibly even both.


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