A hotel in the South East asked us to deal with damage to bedroom and corridor doors and frames on its first floor. The hotel stayed open and occupied throughout. The work took six visits, finishing the floor without a single room going out of service for the repair.
Worst first
The brief was the doors, and there were more of them than the budget comfortably covered in one go. So we started with the doors in the worst condition and worked down the list. That ordering matters more in a hotel than anywhere else: the guest sees one door, theirs, and the doors that look worst are the ones generating the comments.
From there it ran floor by floor and frame by frame: damage to door faces and edges filled and finished, frames made good where trolleys and luggage had taken the paint and timber back, and the finish polished back to match the doors either side.
Why french polishing and not a coat of paint
Hotel doors are usually stained and lacquered timber, not painted. Painting over them changes the look of the whole corridor and gives you a maintenance problem instead of a repair. The work here was french polishing: building the finish back up in thin coats and matching the colour and sheen to the surrounding doors.
That is a skill, not a product. More on it on our french polishing page.
Working in an occupied hotel
This is the whole job, really. The repair is the easy part. What a hotel is actually buying is work that does not reach the guest.
- Corridors stay passable. One door at a time, no corridor closed off, no equipment left out across a walkway.
- Low odour, and timed. Finishing materials have a smell. Which doors get done when is planned around occupancy, not around what is convenient for us.
- Nothing left overnight that a guest can touch. A tacky finish behind a dust sheet at 9pm is a complaint waiting to happen.
- No rooms out of service. Corridor-side door and frame work does not need the room taken off sale, which is the cost a hotel actually feels.
What replacement would have meant
Replacing fire-rated hotel bedroom doors is not a like-for-like swap. It means matched leaves on a lead time, ironmongery and closers off and back on, certification for the fire door set, and the room out of service while it happens. Multiply that across a floor and it becomes a refurbishment project rather than a maintenance item.
Repairing the existing leaves in place keeps the certified door set intact and the rooms selling.
Where we would say no
We do not repair a fire door in a way that interferes with its performance. Damage to the leaf core, to intumescent strips or to the integrity of the door set is a replacement conversation, and we will tell you that rather than make it look better. Cosmetic damage to the faces and frames is what we are for.
How a floor of doors gets quoted
We price work like this by time on site rather than per door, and there is a practical reason for it. The number of doors is known; the condition of each one is not, until the finish is worked back. A door that looks like a deep gouge can turn out to be surface damage in the lacquer, and a mark that looks like nothing can turn out to have gone into the timber.
So the sequence is: walk the floor, agree which doors are the priority, and work down the list in that order. If the budget runs out before the list does, what is left is the least visible damage rather than a random half of the floor.
The other surfaces in a hotel that repair the same way
Doors are usually the first thing a hotel asks about and rarely the only thing we end up quoting. The same argument applies to bathroom surfaces, where a chipped bath or shower tray means a strip-out otherwise, and to worktops and vanity tops in rooms and back of house. Those are covered on bath and shower repair and hotel surface repair.
If your doors are starting to show
Hotels, serviced apartments and aparthotels across London, Essex and Kent. Send photographs of the worst few doors and we will tell you what we can do and in what order. See also hotel and hospitality surface repair and commercial joinery finishing.
Hotel name withheld. Details are taken from our own site reports; the property is not identified.
