Interior oak doors and dog scratches.


ArPauly

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A lady that I do Handyman work for has asked me to refinish three interior oak, two-panel doors.  They have three very high-spirited Kerry Blue Terriers that are extremely intelligent, but even the dog trainer who comes to the house three days a week can't get them to stop scratching at closed doors.  I cut some clear plexi-glass panels to go over the bottom of the damaged doors and attached them with very small brass screws...the problems went away.  Now I'm faced with refinishing these expensive oak doors and I have never dealt with this type of damage before.  The offending scratches range from 8" to 14" and all are on the lower half of the door (below the door knobs).  Just wondering if anyone has any input for working with "clawed" doors.

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The depth of the scratches is the important part here... If they are not to deep, sanding might solve the problem, but then you'll have to sand the entire door to get to the part that is re finishing.  If they are deep, you might be best off finding a cabinet shop and see if they can run them through their planer, or their drum sander. In either case  refinishing, is going to be in order.

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Defending against attackers, plesant company, lack of bitching and complaining..... They have an upside as well

see, my dog is neither pleasent, nor is there a lack of bitching if you consider the barking... And I have a decent selection of small arms to defend against attackers
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If these are going to be finished naturally I don't think there is a lot to be done.  If they are to be painted, epoxy with a filler will work.  I put brass kick plates over the scratched areas on my doors.

 

I had posted a similar question on the Woodenboat forum, asking how to toughen the door against scratching.  I was contemplating kevlar embedded in clear epoxy.  The response I got was either train the dogs or get rid of them.

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Terry lives in a castle, don't forget.  Castles are dark and dank and they have rats.  Sometimes they die and Terry smelts them.  One of the few drawbacks of being royalty and living in a castle.  The other being they don't have showers, only baths, and they only take them once a week or so.  Also because there's no running water, your poop stinks up the whole castle.  A lotta stink in a castle.

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Terry lives in a castle, don't forget. Castles are dark and dank and they have rats. Sometimes they die and Terry smelts them. One of the few drawbacks of being royalty and living in a castle. The other being they don't have showers, only baths, and they only take them once a week or so. Also because there's no running water, your poop stinks up the whole castle. A lotta stink in a castle.

so, it's a life of luxury... With smells of poverty?
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I learned this from an old timer about 40 years ago. I have used it about 3 times and had pretty good success with it.  Place a damp towel over the scratches and then place a hot iron Like you would use to iron clothes on the towel for 10-15 seconds and steam the area(use the linen or close to the highest setting on the iron).  Sometimes if the wood fibers are not damaged to much they will swell with the heat and moisture, then you can sand it flush and most of the time you can't tell it was there.  again this all depends on how damaged the fibers are.  Worst case is you are where you started

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Thanks for all the advice, folks.  I'll keep it in mind as I attack the problem (but, can't do anything about training or removing the dogs...they aren't mine and it's not my house).  Never tried the heat/moisture trick before...I'll let you know how it works for me.

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