Natural wooden doors or paint them white?

[whereisthejoy]

Wall colours in house are mostly off-white and pale greys.

And staircase - natural wood colour or painted white?

Opinions please

Personally, I'd live with the natural look for a few years and then when I'd fancy a change I'd paint them white. I definitely wouldn't want to be doing it the other way round.

We have a similar colour scheme to yours, and painted the doors with Ronseal white ash floor varnish - which gave them a lovely pale sheen but kept a subtle grain/knotty finish. (We'd done the floor with this and had some left over in the tin, we weren't expecting the doors to look as good as they do!)

As above : leave natural and see if you like the look

Stripping paint is very hard work & doesn’t always look good, so be sure before you paint over!

Depends on the light I think. When Dm moved into her smallish cottage they had natural wood doors but had them painted white when they decorated a couple of years ago and it's so much better as their house errs on the dingy side at times.

We have oak internal doors and they are natural. Way too good to paint. Cheap wood - I might be tempted.

We have oak treads on the stairs. Oak handrail. The risers and spindles are painted white. Looks great and we haven’t touched the oak in 10 years. Stays perfect!

I had my upstairs doors dipped and stripped and, whilst I wasn't sure at first, after a few weeks I think they look fab. I need to replace the downstairs doors too and will go with wood. And get around to varnishing/oiling them all at some point...! Stairs are carpeted. 1950s ex LA house

It depends on the quality and colour of the wood. Natural wood beats painted any day of the week, unless it's nasty orange pine.

I'd leave them. I wish I'd never painted my woodwork white. Gloss goes yellow in time now so I went with satinwood. It's been 2 years and already yellowing.

We replaced all our doors with original 1930s '1 over 3 panel' doors that had been stripped. Considered having them painted (there are 9 of them) until a decorator pointed out how much work/time/cost it would be.
Primer, undercoat, top coat, both sides x 9, plus job for life. (I know you can get some combined paints now)
Left them natural...

Ammonite from Farrow & Ball (matched by Johnston's paint) is what we have on ours now. So much better than the wood doors we had, for years. If they had been beautiful Victorian doors or the like I'd have kept them wood but they weren't - they were decent wood doors but there were just a lot of them being woody! So, now painted, much better visually.

Agree with posters who say leave it for a while. My front room looks like a sauna, with masses of wood doors and walls, and floors, and I followed advice and painted a bit of it white. Such a mistake: the ceiling to floor windows on one side keep the room flooded with light all year round, no need for more paint.

I'm in Australia, where entire walls of windows are not unusual.

The light is different in the UK, of course, but the wait and see advice is still sound.

from what you say, it sounds like they are already painted.

It is very hard to clean paint off doors.

So paint them again.

@AWaspOnAWindowReturns wow! Can you please post a picture? Sounds like a happy medium for us to reach - I want white and DH wants natural!

Great advice all, thanks so much. Okay, will leave them (for a bit ) - they're natural at the moment and quite nice doors to be fair, but it's a big house and there's a lot of wooden floor the same colour so it's a bit much for my liking.

Gloss goes yellow in time now so I went with satinwood. It's been 2 years and already yellowing.

@Titsywoo anything oil based whether gloss or satinwood will yellow. You want water based to avoid yellowing. But you do need proper prep and primer to paint water based over oil based.

[quote whereisthejoy]@AWaspOnAWindowReturns wow! Can you please post a picture? Sounds like a happy medium for us to reach - I want white and DH wants natural![/quote]
I'll try! Not sure how as never done it before...

[quote whereisthejoy]@AWaspOnAWindowReturns wow! Can you please post a picture? Sounds like a happy medium for us to reach - I want white and DH wants natural![/quote]
Hope this works...

Here's another one in better light for you:

Those look really lovely @AWaspOnAWindowReturns, perfect middle ground

@sparklewater

Those look really lovely *@AWaspOnAWindowReturns*, perfect middle ground

Glad to help out!

weve just replaced old painted doors with wooden ones and they look so much better we osmo oiled ours because we dont intend to paint them still got painted frames though

Thank you @AWaspOnAWindowReturns ! Those look gorgeous!!!!! Going to go for that

@whereisthejoy

Thank you *@AWaspOnAWindowReturns* ! Those look gorgeous!!!!! Going to go for that

I'm glad you've found a solution! One thing I'd say is that with it being floor varnish, it goes on far better on a horizontal surface. We bought two cheap plastic folding "horses" (don't know the proper word for them!) and lay the doors flat on these, painted two coats on each side then hung them.

Our doors were pine which I didn’t like but when painted white they did yellow over time. Now we have painted them in farrow and ball borrowed light ( water based paint) and they have stayed lovely.