When my wife Barbara and I closed on our house at the end of August 1999, we knew we had work to do. The back yard was a thicket of three-foot-high grass and weeds, the place had no central AC (a real problem here in the New South), the floors needed refinishing and every wall (inside and out) needed paint.

In the intervening two years, we've done the floors, had the burglar bars removed from the windows and painted the outside of the house, had central AC and heat installed and painted about half the rooms. Plus a few other small things. About two months ago we repainted the central hallway, which opens up to all but one room in the house. A total of nine doors sit on the edges of this passageway.

We painted the walls, ceiling and trim in the hallway, but then we decided to strip down the doors and get all the paint off the hardware. Back in July, I tried to strip the paint off the back side of the linen closet door.

One week and a half-gallon of stripper later the door still held plenty of paint, and in any case the wood didn't look all that great anyway. I made a command decision: The doors would be simply scraped and repainted.

So, after my extensive set of vacations in late July and early August, I got down to work. Getting the hinges off the frames (and the doors) was the most difficult task. I bought a new (big) screwdriver just for the task, but that alone hardly did the trick. These hinges had sixty or seventy years (different city documents say our house was built in either 1932 or 1939--the latter date is more likely for a variety of reasons) of paint on them, and long ago the grooves for the screws all but disappeared. If I was lucky, there was enough of a hint that I could stick the screwdriver in the right spot and hammer away at the screw (almost like using a chisel) to clean out the groove and remove the screw. If I was unlucky, I spent half an hour stripping the groove almost irretrievably before finally budging the ancient sliver of metal.

Scraping and painting the doors was easy, though time consuming. Stripping the hardware (knobs, keyholes, latches, hinges, keepers--that's the little metal thing the latch catches on when you close the door, etc.) was somewhat more difficult, though less time-consuming. Polishing the newly-clean metal was a breeze.

In all, it took three weeks--twelve days after rainouts, often spending 12 hours or more per day on the task--to refinish (and plane, if necessary) and rehang seven doors. Sharp eyes will note that two disappeared. The door to the kitchen went away long before we bought the house, and we decided to remove the entry door to the hallway from the living room since we rarely--if ever--used it. I even bought an old lock set and door plate to replace the one that the previous owners of the house removed from our bedroom door. For some folks, the idea of sleeping in a room with a door that has no knobs or other way of closing might be a little freaky. Not so for me. I grew up that way (the story is a long one, and it generally ends with Barbara shrieking "You were raised by wolves!"), and when there's nobody else in the house, who cares if the door closes securely?

Yeah, yeah. The thing is, the doors look great. The old brass shines (if there is enough brass left on the metal, that is) and the doors gleam. The hallway looks complete. And it is nice to actually be able to open and close just about every door in the house. Sure, I put in a lot of work, but to be honest we shoulda done this a long time ago. Reminds me of how I fixed a broken porch step on our old house in St. Petersburg, Fla., just before putting it on the market. Took me about two hours, including the hour I spent in Home Depot wandering around looking for what I needed. Shoulda done that as soon as I finished repainting the porch two days after buying that house. I didn't, and we didn't really get to enjoy the fruits of my later labor.

Now, though, I'm resolved. We're getting some work done in another bedroom (replacing a window and some plaster--the sorta thing I'm happy to pay someone to do), and then we've got our final projects in line. Repaint that bedroom, repaint the bathroom and then the biggie: repaint the kitchen cabinets and rehang all the cabinet doors--with new hardware, repaint the kitchen walls and, if all goes well, tile the kitchen floor. We get that done and that's about it for the inside of the house. We'll have actually finished an entire house refinishing project. We can enjoy all our hard work, instead of just passing it on to someone else.

Then, of course, the yard beckons.

I think I'll leave that for 2002.

Jon Worley's refinishing technique is high on foul language and low on acquired skill. His best estimate for actually finishing his house is "sometime before the Missouri Tigers win the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship."