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I'm addicted to HouseBlogs.com and have been for quite some time. I've toyed with the idea of starting my own blog, but figured that since I've completed a lot of the more entertaining tasks here, what's the point? Well I was reminded tonight that there's still a long way to go...

A little background...my dog and I live in a 70 year old money pit in NJ. When I initially moved in, I had no idea that a good part of the house had been fed to the termites. The first project was rebuilding a rotten, termite eaten wall between the kitchen and dining room. I am eternally grateful to my uncles for doing this for me. Since then, I've laid tile, stripped wallpaper, put down laminate, stripped wallpaper, refinished floors, stripped wallpaper, replaced molding, stripped wallpaper, stripped paint from doors and banisters, minor electrical stuff, washer and dryer repair... oh, and I had to take down some wallpaper.

Yes Mom...after college, I became a stripper. In an effort to preserve a few remaining brain cells, I started taking doors to a local paint stripping place to let them remove the 5 or 6 layers of ivory, pink, aqua and avocado green paint. These aren't super fancy doors, but I like the original door hardware, and it's good to re-use the doors, and all that. The doors came out beautifully. I sanded and stained them, stripped and refinished the hardware, and they are happily doing what doors do.

But then someone decided to play a trick on me. I dropped two doors off a couple months ago, and when they finally got stripped last weekend, the man at the stripping place (no, not a go-go bar) called me talking about how the doors were veneered and would need to be reglued.) This surprised me, since all of the other doors were single paneled, with a solid wood frame. So I went to pick up the doors today. Oh my. The veneer is horribly buckled, and really, the color of the wood is so varied and "off" that even were I to try to put forth the effort to save these doors, I think they would still look awful.

WTF? Why did the original house builders in the 40s torture me by sneaking these veneered pieces of crap into the mix? And what do I do now?! The molding around the frames for these doors has already been put up and caulked and painted around. I really don't want to tear this all down to put a pre-hung door in... Yeah, I could try to find doors with mortise lock holes that would fit...but I haven't seen any that would fit well... I'm guessing that out of the 3 remaining downstairs doors to be addressed, 2 of them will also prove to be veneered. I could probably strip them with out the damage that the other two sustained (the industrial stripping is much harder on the stripp-ee, I think)...but would they still look crappy?

STAY TUNED, for answers to these questions and more!