What can I do to improve the appearance of the plain, painted interior doors in my house? Can I use moulding to create a raised-panel look?—Ron O’Connel, Selkirk, Man.
This is a great project and well worth doing because it can improve the appearance of your doors so much. To achieve success, you need to deal with three things: the profile of trim you’ll use, the pattern you’ll apply and the way you’ll fasten the trim to your doors. This project involves some artistic judgement.
Astragal is the name of a profile that’s meant for application on flat surfaces. It comes in various widths and a few, slightly different shapes. An ordinary interior door typically looks best with a 3⁄4"- to 1"-wide astragal, but that’s just a guideline. Cut strips from scrap wood and hold them against your door to get a sense of what width looks proportional before you buy.
Experimenting with strips is also an effective way to come up with an optimal pattern of trim on your door face. But before you do that, try some scale drawings. For situations such as this, I often find that a scale combining metric and imperial measurements works well. A ratio of 3 mm to the inch lets a normal door height fill most of a regular-sized sheet of paper, and that’s what you want. Draw the outlines of your door first, then start fooling around with various trim patterns. The ones I think you’ll like best involve vertical rectangles—either one tall one above a shorter one, or two pairs of tall ones over two pairs of shorter ones. What you’re aiming to create is a pattern that’s reminiscent of the frame-and-panel construction of traditional solid-wood doors. When you’ve settled on a pattern you like, cut some scrap strips to length and use some double-sided tape to fasten them temporarily to one door as it hangs vertically. How does it look? Now is the time to tweak the arrangement, settling on what seems best to your eye.
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