If a door in your home is buried under decades of paint, there are four main ways to strip it back: sanding, chemical paint stripper, a heat gun, or professional dipping. Here’s how each one compares — and which gives the best finish.
1. Sanding by hand or machine
Sanding works for flat surfaces and light paint, but it struggles the moment a door has mouldings, panels or beading — the exact places paint builds up most. It’s slow, dusty work, and it’s very easy to round off crisp edges and detail. Older paint may also contain lead, and sanding it creates hazardous dust, so it’s best avoided on anything pre-1980s without proper precautions.
2. Chemical paint strippers
Brush-on paint strippers soften the paint so you can scrape it away. They can work well on small areas and intricate detail, but on a whole door covered in many layers they become expensive, slow and messy — you often need several applications, plenty of ventilation, and careful disposal of the residue. They’re a reasonable option for a single panel or fine carving, less so for a full door.
3. Heat guns and infrared strippers
Heat softens paint so it can be scraped off, and it’s effective on flat sections. The risks are scorching the timber, cracking any glass, and — again — vaporising old lead paint if you overheat it. Heat is fiddly around mouldings and glazing bars, and it takes patience to do a whole door without leaving marks.
4. Caustic dipping — the best option for whole doors
For stripping a complete door back to bare timber, dipping is by far the most effective method. The door is lowered into a warm caustic solution that lifts every layer of paint and varnish at once — from both faces, all four edges, and deep into every panel and moulding — then it’s pressure-washed, neutralised and dried. You get an even, thorough strip that hand methods simply can’t match, with none of the dust or fumes at home.
Dipping suits the vast majority of solid timber doors. The main exceptions are veneered and plywood doors, which can delaminate, and very delicate or water-damaged pieces — these are better hand-stripped. Oak and some hardwoods can darken slightly, which is worth knowing if you plan a natural finish.
So, what’s the best way?
For a single small area or fine detail, a chemical stripper can do the job. But for a whole door — or a whole house of doors — professional dipping gives the cleanest, most even result for the least effort and mess. It reaches what you can’t, removes old paint safely off-site, and returns the door as honest bare timber ready to wax, oil, stain or paint.
That’s exactly what we do at Global Door Stripping: we collect your doors for a flat £30, dip and strip them back to bare wood at our workshop, and return them ready to finish. Get a free quote or read more about our interior door stripping.