Front Door Gets New Paint

Hi there!  I have been thinking about starting a blog for such a long time… but today as I stood on my front porch drying paint on the front door with a blow dryer… I decided today was the day!  Most people in the north-east don’t paint their front doors in January, but apparently I am not most people.  Frankly, I was sick of looking at the gross state of the door, so I decided to take advantage of the 50+ degree weather, and I got painting.  Too bad for me I awoke to a super foggy morning and the paint was starting to slide right off the door because it was so moist out.  So hair dryer to the rescue…

The next picture was the front porch when we bought the house 3.5 years ago.  We have done so much since then, including a new asphalt driveway and stamped concrete porch and apron, but never painted that door!  {And NO I did not do the asphalt or concrete myself, but I did design it, get the permits and act as the general contractor, but I digress.}

Eeew!  They looked even worse after I sanded them.  I used an electric palm sander on all the flat surfaces and then a folded up piece of sand paper to get into all the grooves.  It needed more sanding on the bottom half because that is where the sun had really abused the door.

Ok, I totally forgot to mention that these are fiberglass wood-look doors.  They are NOT wood.  I would have loved to stain the doors but they would have looked crappy.  {If you really really want to stain fiberglass doors use a gel stain.  Gel stains work great on unfinished fiberglass doors.  Mine was factory finished and the stain would have taken differently to the areas that had been flaking off and were sanded down.}  I really wanted to go with a COLORED door, but ended up listening to my friends who pointed out that there were already a bunch of colors on my house {red brick, grey porch, blue siding, black shutters}.  Well, honestly, I bought green paint because I was convinced I wanted to paint the doors green.  But I had a change of heart when I got home… and now I have green stairs going down to my basement because this Smart Girl was not going to waste perfectly good paint!

I found this paint in the garage.  It was never opened and must have been left by the old owners (4 years ago)!

I used a 1/2″ brush for the grooves, followed by a 4″ roller for the flat surfaces. This is how far I got the first night…

I was able to paint all the way to the edges of the door because I taped the interior and I kept the doors slightly ajar as long as I could, which was until I went to bed last night.

I wish I had a picture of the paint starting to drip off the door this morning… but at least I got a picture of the hair dryer in action!

This is the what it looks like now. In the spring I will give it a final coat of paint and replace with new hardware. Forget that, new hardware runs at least $250, so we’ll just be keeping what we’ve got!