Hallway Stripping coming along

Well it's a hard place to strip since it's so narrow, we finished stripping/sanding one of the doorways last night. We start with the heat gun and get all the paint off. There's this goo underneath, it's like filler, but it's everywhere. I do a coat of chemical stripper, to get the thick parts of that off. Then you need to scrub it hard with denatured alchohol. I use the 3m stripping pads instead of steel wool. You soak it in alcohol, then scrub like crazy. I think I spent 2 hours scrubbing the one doorway. When it's 99% cleaned off, I switch to sandpaper. I use a coarse 100 grit, then 180 grit. Anyways, we got the first coat of waterlox on, and it looks mostly good. Might have to steal Gary's trick of painting the parts that still show paint. I've been finding that 4 coats of waterlox does a good job. So 3 more coats, and then strip the hardware, and we're ready to put the door to the upstairs back up. There's still a long way to go, that'll be 2 doors out of the 7 doors in the hallway. Only the bedroom and the bathroom are still there, so we're half done. We're planning on getting new ones for the dining room, and the living room. Probably french doors, with a prairie pattern, to match the windows (the original ones) and the front door.

We're also trying to find good replacement windows. I'd like to avoid vinyl windows. We may use them in the kids rooms upstairs, we'd rather not though. I've been looking at Marvin windows, they're one of the only ones that has vertical grain fir as an option, and they're the only ones that have the fir, and inserts as an option. Loewen has fir windows, put they dont' do the insert type. The Marvin french doors are really nice too, they have the european style locking frames, so they're really secure, since we'd be using them as exterior doors, to the new deck we're planning. I'm sure they're really pricey too, so I'm sure we'll be saving our pennies for a long time. For the interior, we're thinking the simpson doors look nice. We've looked for salvage doors, and haven't really found anything good, so we'll probably end up with new. It seems like salvage french doors, in the pattern we're looking for are hard to find.