Need some help, staining doors for home

[Wes Billups]

I could use some suggestions. I've got quite a few doors to stain and finish for our basement project and I just proceeded to drop the first door while staining and broke it right at the knob mortise. I'm a little frustrated right now and would like to get some suggestions on what the pro's do. I only have enough floor space to stain one door at a time. I'm looking for methods to be able to apply the stain set the door aside while working on the next. I thought I had a good idea until one of the screws I drove into the bottom split the door causing it to drop from the saw horse.

Pictures of your setup are always appreciated.

Thanks,
Wes

[Matt Meiser]

I don't have photos and I'm not a pro, but we did 4 for our bedroom a while back. The way I did it was to drive screws into the bottom of each door to stand it off the ground. Then stood two up and while my wife held them I used some 1x scrap and screwed through it down into the top of 2 doors that were ~90 degrees to each other. That let them hold each other up. Worked good enough for me.

Doing one right now for at the bottom of our newly-enclosed basement stairs and we just did the sawhorse thing. Actually my contractor friend that did the drywall work for me stained it --we just have to put the poly on.

By the way, he did something I've never tried before and it worked great. We had a lot of trouble getting it even on the doors we stained. He brushed Sealcoat, cut 50% with DNA to make a 1lb cut on everything before staining. It went on easily and beautifully.