When I’m not scrolling endlessly on Pinterest to look for sweater sales, we like to research the history of our house. And this week we found some interesting information that totally changes the way we understood a big part of our house: the doors!

Remember how we did a whole post about restoring our solid oak doors?

While doing research, we came across Miracle Doors. And now we’re sure that the doors in our house are not solid wood (like we said). We’re also pretty sure that they’re not solid oak (like we said).

Oh, well. That’s what learning is for!

Note: The door frames are solid wood, but the panels are veneered. You can see more details on the websites and resources below.

Browse a Paine Lumber Miracle Door Catalog

While I was posting my update to Instagram, I also stumbled across this amazing Paine Lumber Miracle Door Catalog from 1923!

You can flip through the pages and see the options that Paine Lumber offered and the recommendations they made to their customers for materials, decor, and types of wood to use. Thank goodness for librarians, historians, and archive.org!

Since our house was built in 1915 and all of our doors are like this, it’s entirely possible that we have Miracle Doors in our home.

So although we thought our lovely French doors were oak, they’re probably just … not. It’s more likely that they’re pine with a walnut or birch veneer. Not that it matters! They’re still gorgeous doors, and now we have a little more history about them.

Regardless, we’re still working our way through restoring the doors in our house. In fact, Pat is busy restoring one right now, since we’re taking a break from the bathroom project (more information on that coming soon). You can see a small photo gallery of our doors below.

So obviously, a big shout-out to Materials Unlimited for writing about Miracle Doors! We found their post to be a really fun read. So go check out Salvaged. I personally fell down an internet hole on their website/blog, so go take a look: Salvaged Blog by Materials Unlimited