LESLIE: Marilyn in Iowa needs some help refinishing a fiberglass door. Tell us about the project.
MARILYN: Yes, I had moved into a house that had a gel stain on a fiberglass door and it had some old stain left on it.
TOM: (overlapping voices) OK.
MARILYN: And I just stained around the gel stain, over the top of it. Now some of the old stain is showing through and I don’t like the looks of it.
TOM: Yeah. You can’t put good stain over bad stain. (chuckles) It just doesn’t work out that way, Marilyn.
MARILYN: Right.
TOM: So what you should have done is removed it. Now, the gel stain that you used, what kind of gel stain did you get?
MARILYN: Minwax.
TOM: Yeah. That’s designed for wood; that’s not designed for fiberglass. What I would do is I would go to the website for Therma-Tru Doors – ThermaTru.com. They actually invented a stain designed specifically for fiberglass doors.
See, when you try to use a stain that’s designed for wood on fiberglass you never get very good results because wood absorbs the stain and fiberglass doesn’t; it lays on top. And you need to use the stain that has the right density and that’s why you need a stain designed specifically for fiberglass doors. You cannot use a wood product on top of that.
So what you’re going to do here – and it’s good news because you can actually remove all that stain that’s there and then use the right type of gel stain, such as the one made by Therma-Tru, and it’ll look gorgeous and you’ll be very happy and it’ll last a long time.
MARILYN: And what do I use to remove the stain then?
TOM: You’re going to use a paint stripper to remove that.
MARILYN: Oh, OK.
TOM: I would probably use – I don’t think you’re going to have to abrade it; in fact, I don’t think you want to do that. I think you’re probably just going to use a product like Rock Mineral.
LESLIE: Mm-hmm. That’s a good one.
MARILYN: What’s it called?
TOM: (overlapping voices) Rock Mineral.
LESLIE: (overlapping voices) It’s called Rock Mineral. And it comes in like a metal container sort of like a turpentine container, looks like. And I like it because it’s thick. You can see it working. It doesn’t run all over the place. But definitely, take the door down, lay it down flat and do your work on a flat surface.
MARILYN: Alrighty. Thank you.
TOM: You’re very welcome. Thanks so much for calling us at 1-888-MONEY-PIT.
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