Door Stripping
The craftsmen who designed and constructed the doors and shutters of yesteryear were well trained and specialised masters, only allowed to work after seven years of apprenticeship. They produced some remarkable work, which we help to preserve and renovate today. The periods which we usually deal with are Stuart, normally made of planks of wood with a frame around it, Georgian with characteristic six panel doors, Victorian four panel pieces, Edwardian which have a typical profile of three long panels in the bottom and a bigger one on the top and the more modern House of Windsor entryways. The wood used to construct these doors would usually be of the highest quality.
The wood was seasoned for up to seven years, carefully curated air seasoning which took place outdoors so they would have an opportunity to dry out thoroughly without any of the stresses modern timber goes through in kiln drying, which takes from six to eight weeks to complete - a much shorter time! Further, most modern doors or not actually solid timber, but are in fact made of many small pieces of wood joined together, engineered to be cheap, mass produced and reasonably robust. When stripping antique doors it must be remembered that it is possible for them to warp and twist, that is why we only have doors in the stripping solution for half an hour to the maximum of three quarters of an hour.
All of these problems can be avoided by using our services at Dipstrip. In the vast majority of cases their doors are not in the bath for anymore than 45 minutes and thus the doors come back to our clients dry, and quickly.
