After letting the door weather for three to four weeks, I started trying to clean it up a little. All of the moulding holding in the glass panes were secured with regular steel brads and had been nicely rusted away by the salty beach air. With a little bit of elbow grease I was able to pull most of them out without breaking any of the wood. Some were just too far gone. I placed the glass panes aside and put the two ratchet straps around the door. These were to prevent a repeat of the door-falling-apart episode from the elevators. These would stay on for the next six weeks. If you look in the upper-right hand of the picture above, you can see the rotted out seam that split the first time.

A colony of ants had hitchhiked to D.C. in that same upper right hand corner. As I was letting the wood dry out, I was also spraying down any open hole twice a day with ant killer. It took a good week of this until I stopped waking up to new ant bodies lying around the exterior of the door. Phase one was complete.

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