When you buy a solid wood door, there is a good chance that you will be purchasing an extremely attractive addition to your house. They can be used as both external and internal doors, and will almost always lend your house a much more classic and homely feel.
When you buy a new wood door, there is a high possibility that it will come unstained so as to give you a choice of finish that better suits your home. This means that you will often need to paint or stain the door yourself to ensure it is as protected as possible.
This is much more important for external doors as they will be much more exposed to the elements. However, adding just a simple finish to the door might not be enough to fully protect it against nature. Sanding the door lightly to open the wood’s pores and applying a few coats of a good quality sealer will give much stronger protection against sun damage. For those whose doors are in direct sunlight for long periods of the day, a simple finish alone probably won’t protect adequately against ultra violet rays, never mind the excessive wind and rain the UK is prone to.
However, when thinking about internal doors (and sometimes exterior ones too), there is another factor to think about. Whilst staining, finishing and sealing might offer a good amount of protection to your expensive new doors, there is one more thing that many people forget to protect against – pets.
To prevent cats scratching your door, you don’t need any paints or varnishes, but instead simply need to ensure your cat has plenty of other surfaces to scratch. Cats and dogs may still scratch doors in a bid to be let into a room, and if this is the case you simply need to use a protective panel to cover the door while you train your cat or dog not to do so.