All Forum Posts by: Marcus Auerbach

I am wrestling with the same question: my rental houses are typically 50 years old and I spend about 25k for a complete makeover. Sanding and staining is not a commercially viable option - too much labor involved for the value of a non-historic 3/2 ranch, so we usually try to clean the trim up and use a good wipe-on polyurethane to reseal them. If we refinish the floors we replace the quarter rounds. We do the same with the hollow core doors and the window trim, to keep everything in the same look and finish. The result is a clean house with trim that can be wiped down wet if necessary. But of course you can still see imperfections sealed into the poly. So the last house we tried painting the trim white. Now, to keep the uniform look you have to spray also all the room and closet doors white. And to get really nice results you need to sand, fill, sand more and prep everything nicely before you spray the two coats. In the end I was tempted to also replace the hardware, because after all the time and money we had spent the hinges the doorknobs looked old on those new looking white doors. Bottom line for me is that it's totally not worth it. Either its good enough and cleans up or if its past that point of revival then the only option is to take 100% trims and doors out and replace with new quality stuff. That's the most expensive option, but it will look nice again for the next 50 years. At least that's what I hope ;-)