How do I gloss a panel door without lap marks?

The difficulty with a panel door is not any individual part. It is that a door has more surface area than stays wet, so if you paint it in the order your eye suggests you will be joining wet paint to half-set paint repeatedly, and every one of those joins shows in a gloss finish. Painters use a fixed sequence to make sure the joins fall in places where the paint is still live.

Step by step

1. Take the furniture off rather than painting round it.Handles, escutcheons and finger plates off, hinges left on. Painting round a handle leaves a visible ring and glues the rose to the door.
2. Wedge the door open and paint it in place.Taking a door off to lay it flat sounds better than it is: dust settles on a horizontal surface, and you cannot do both faces. Wedge it firmly so it cannot swing.
3. Prepare the whole door and dust it thoroughly.Fill, abrade to a uniform key, and remove every trace of dust. Gloss on a door is at eye level in a hallway and shows everything.
4. Paint the panels first, including their mouldings.Do the moulding around each panel and the flat of the panel together, then lay off vertically. Do not let paint build up in the internal corners of the moulding — that is where runs start.
5. Paint the vertical pieces between and beside the panels next.These are the muntins. Lay off vertically along their length.
6. Paint the horizontal rails.Top, middle and bottom rails, laid off horizontally along their length. Where a rail meets a stile, keep the change of direction crisp rather than brushing round the corner.
7. Paint the two outer vertical stiles last.Full height, laid off vertically. Because they are painted last they cover the ends of the rails cleanly.
8. Do the hinge edge and the lock edge, then check for runs.Edges are where runs form, because paint gathers on a narrow surface. Go back over the edges once after a few minutes and look along the door in raking light.
9. Leave it open until it has properly hardened.Closing a door onto its frame before the paint has hardened sticks the two together and tears the film when it is opened.

Tips

• Check the door edge as you go by sighting along the face from one end — runs are obvious from that angle and invisible from straight on.
• If the door has been painted many times and the panel mouldings look soft and shallow, more gloss will make it worse rather than better.
• Paint the top edge too, especially on an external door. It is the edge nobody paints and the one that lets water into the core.

Common mistakes

• Painting the stiles first because they are the biggest bits. — It puts the joins in the wrong place, and each rail then laps onto a stile that has begun to set.
• Loading the brush heavily in the panel mouldings. — Paint pools in the internal angle and runs down the panel an hour later, long after you have stopped looking.

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