Redwood Garage Door Refinishing: Step by Step

As you get progressively towards the bottom, it starts to weather and looks horrible. There’s virtually no more finish on it. You can see here on the horizontal surfaces that it’s weathered at a different rate than the verticals. That’s typical because everything lands on the horizontal surfaces; it receives more UV than the verticals. As you get progressively down to the bottom, it starts to get really bad, probably from the overhang. The water hits the floor, bounces up here, and you can see some green algae here on the brick. There’s just a lot for this garage door to endure.

Okay guys, so I wanted to talk a little bit about why this door looks the way it does. The most obvious reason is because it has not been serviced for maintenance or any attention has been done to it for a really long time. So that’s one. And then, you know, just here in Pasadena, we have a decent amount of rain here in the foothills. The last three years, a little bit of drought conditions, but last year we had record rain. Go figure, there’s no rhyme or reason with Mother Nature here. But we do have a lot of sun. This gets some filtered diffused morning sun that comes through the tree here, and then it gets some midday sun and some afternoon sun. So it’s in varying degrees and that matters. It matters how much sun and how much weather the door will get.

Also, it has weathered because the wood expands and contracts microscopically. You can see that if you come down here, you have these cracks. You have some cracks down here. With temperature change, we have a really cool morning today and then it’ll probably heat up to maybe 80°. You have a decent amount of temperature change and the wood will expand and contract. What doesn’t expand and contract is the finish. There’s a big misconception about varnish and film-forming finishes being absolutely bulletproof. Unfortunately, that is not the case. They need to be maintained and maintenance needs to be followed up so we keep this door intact. So all of these changes can be reversed and you’re going to go ahead and see our technique on doing that.

One more thing I just wanted to touch on is the subject of the varying rates of weather around someone’s home. We have another door here, a side gate, and you can see it’s less weathered. You still have a decent amount of weathering here but it’s a lot less weathered. Why? Because it doesn’t receive the same amount of sunlight. If you’ve got doors all around your house, they are going to weather at varying rates, and that’s an important thing to notice. You can also take a look at this little cover here. It doesn’t receive any sun and it’s in perfect condition. Again, the different areas around your home, if you have doors all around or even windows, things like that, maybe even decks, they are going to weather at varying rates depending on the amount of sun and rain and exposure and use that it gets.

Okay guys, so the stripping of the wood is continuing. Got a lot of it done here. I think I spoke on it before, but we always speak on this when people call us about stripping doors that are 50, 60, 70 years old or they have paint on it or some sort of opaque finish. You never know what you’re going to unearth once you start stripping off a solid coating, paint, things like that. Here is a prime example. We unearthed all of this putty or filler. In all honesty, it’s a pink color. It looks like it is maybe Bondo or something, only God knows. But we unearthed this stuff here and it’s just something that we wanted to bring to your attention. It’s something that we come across all the time.

Okay guys, so it’s day two and we have most of the garage door sanded down. We just wanted to point out a few things again. Again, when you’re stripping paint or multiple coat finishes or stains that are opaque or semi-opaque, you never know what you’re going to unearth, just like we unearthed all this stuff here, this filler. There’s some here, there’s some here. Just be careful when you’re stripping things and spending all that time and all that money, you never know what you’re going to unearth. Also, I just want to point out that we get in between these channels here in the corners. It’s just slow and tedious work. This is why our costs are the way that they are. At least at Teak Master, our process, we get into all of this stuff. If you come over here, I know some people will talk and say that, “Oh, well, you don’t have to get in there, no one’s going to see it and the stain’s going to cover it.” Well, the stain wasn’t going to cover deteriorating finishes. The finish was blistering and peeling, there’s weathering at the bottom. Rather than compromise, that’s not the Teak Master way. We’ll go ahead and get in between here, we’ll do a little extra work. That’s why people hire us, and I’d recommend whoever you’re contracting that they do the same because there’s only one way to do it and that’s the right way. This is the way we do it. I also wanted to point out that look at this beautiful refinished redwood here and then the areas that aren’t sanded yet but that are stripped. What a difference between this and this. It’s just detailed work and the next step is staining and we’ll go ahead and show you how we do that.

Hey guys, we are done with refinishing this vintage custom redwood garage door here in Pasadena, California. I just wanted to recap what we did to refinish it. We started out by chemically stripping the coating that was failing. Then we sanded it. Sanding was the most important step because that gets everything down to beautiful bare smooth raw wood. As you guys saw, we got into the grooves and channels and corners and preserved all the attributes of the door. That’s obviously very important. Then after that, we cleaned the door to remove the dust from the grain. Then we stained it. We used oil-based penetrating stains. We did three different samples for our client and he zeroed in on the one that he liked. That’s what we do for all of our customers. We do samples. We have all of the samples on the truck, so your project manager will be able to zero in on exactly what you want in terms of samples and colors and things like that. There’s no guessing, no looking at computer screens or pieces of paper or running back and forth to the store. We have all of that stuff on the truck. After he zeroed in on the color, we stained it and then we spray-applied three layers of the satin clear coat. In between the clear coat finishes, we finish sanded. That way we get a beautiful hard and smooth furniture grade type outcome for this garage door. As you can see, it looks amazing. Our client’s really happy. We hope you guys like this video. If you did, go ahead and click that like button. Follow us because we’re coming out with more videos just like this. If you have any comments that you’d like to leave in the comment section regarding maybe your process or wanting to see a different process or if you have any questions about our process, go ahead and leave that in the comment section. We’ll respond as soon as we can. Go ahead and take a look at teakmaster.com. It’s our website, it’s full of information. Thank you guys so much for tuning in to our video. Tim Gilliam with Teak Master, signing out.