Repairing internal house moulded/flat panel doors

Repairing Internal Doors

First we must establish the type of doors you have, this post is for moulded or panel hollow doors some pictured below

moulded hollow panel door

Flat panel hollow door

Now both the above type doors are hollow, and the way they are made is with a wood frame made out of solid wood then they have thin panels glued onto the frames to make your door. Its quite a simple cheap design and its effective.

Now if  your not sure if your doors are like these ones look below at the picture

What your seeing here is a flat panel door at the bottom, this is usually what happens the panels come away from the frame of the door. just to clarify we are not talking about the door frame thats fixed to the wall we are talking about the door's wood frame that its made up of. You may need to take some paint off the side of the door to see the panel  edges if your panels haven't come away like the one pictured.

Repairing the doors

Ok so in this picture we could easily repair this door and fix the panel's back on to the door's frame by simply using some wood glue or pva (same thing really) and glue the panels back on. To hold it in place you can use some tape so it stays in place then remove it when the glue has dried and your done.

In another scenario you may have a hole in the panel(s) and your thinking right i need a new door now but no you can still repair the door without it costing you much money at all and all you need to do is get down to your local diy store B&Q, homebase etc or maybe a timber yard.

In a diy store they sell whats called hardboard. The thickness is 3mm which is how thick the panels are, one side is smooth (can be bought in plain hardboard or white) and the other side resembles a # and it is rough. Unfortunately (looking at the first picture of the moulded door) i dont think you can get moulded door panels only flat hardboard.

Obviously you need to measure the door and take into account you need 1 panel per side, so make sure you get some the size you need or bigger. Now this job can be done with the doors hanging up but would be easier to do it with the door flat on a table or something.

You need to cut the hardboard to fit the door's frame, do so while the door is still intact cut the panel a bit bigger than the existing one so you have a bit spare to work with. once cut a little bigger than the door remove the existing panel. Be aware though some doors can be uneven at the top, bottom and sides so make sure you measure length and width in more than 1 place.

With the panel removed place your cut panel onto the door's frame where you took off the old panel, now this next bit can be done in many different ways depending on what tools you have etc but i will give you some examples.

Either tack the panel to the door and cut it using a saw and finish off the edges with a file, then once you have it all done glue the panel on and remove the tacks and fill/paint over the holes left. If your doing it this way i suggest you use nails with a flat head so you can prize them back out when you need to. The other method is to either tack and glue or just glue down the panel and once done, cut the panel to fit and finish off with a knife and/or file.

Once your done here you can paint the panel if it was plain hardboard or if you got the white type you can just leave it.

Some tips to help you

When you glue down the panel you can either use clamps to hold it together until it dries or tacks or both. If you haven't got either you can use just plain selotape to hold the panel to the door's frame. Be careful what tape you use as you could end up leaving tape residue behind and having a mess to clean up after.

The moulded door's as pictured can be repaired but you will need to change them to a flat panel, you are looking at spending under £10 to repair a door where as if you buy a new one you could pay anything from £25 upwards.

The things you need are below some obviously optional

Hardboard 3mm thick
Tape Measure
Pencil/pen
A saw
Knife
Wood file
Screwdriver(s)
Hammer
Tacks/nails
Pva glue
Clamps
Selotape

I think that covers all bases, remember some of these things are optional and some can be substituted with other things. I hope this helps some people out to get an easy cheap repair for very little money

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