It bothers me to no end when wood throughout a house doesn’t match. I even like all the furniture to match the railings and cabinetry! This may sound funny coming from someone that rarely cares whether or not her socks match (who sees those anyway?) but mismatched wood, to me, is a big no-no. My house right now is a jungle of different wood types/colors and it has been bugging me a LOT. My plan is to refinish all the cabinetry and paint the stair rails white, so this mostly just left the front door to be taken care of. We may end up putting hard wood in the formal living room and I’m not going to let a wood door (the color of which I also don’t like) dictate what color of flooring we’ll have to pick so that it’ll match. Plus, all the furniture in the living room has a much darker stain.
We’ve been in our new place for over a year now and upon considering this, I was pretty bummed when I thought about how little progress we’ve made with the house in that year. I’ve had a hard time budgeting in home improvements (baby medical bills gotta come first) so I decided to see if there was a project around the house that I could do using things we already had on hand. I really like the color of our accent wall from my post “The Chalky Finish Painted Accent Wall” so I looked to see if we had enough of that paint left over to do something else and we did! Yay!
However, I wasn’t sure how well it would look on our front door until I saw this front door refresh while I was browsing Pinterest. I actually chuckled when I came across it because it’s really really close to how I’ve been imagining our entryway to look and their door is almost identical to ours. Our paint color will be more blue/gray and instead of that planked wall I’ve been wanting to do board and batten, but it’ll look really close to theirs. I decided to go ahead and just do it. Here is the door before.
I taped it off, except the windows, and got started. You may be wondering why on earth I wouldn’t tape off the windows and the answer is this. When I painted our front door at the condo I taped off and it still left a mess all over the glass. Which then had to be cleaned off using a razor blade (In the same manner as “The non-toxic way to remove hard water from windows“). I figured that taping is a huge waste of time & tape if I was going to have to scrape paint off anyway.
I got the first coat of paint on and it looked like crap! Just like it should! Remember that several thin coats will give you a better result than one thick gloppy coat will. Chalky finish paint doesn’t require a primer…in case you were wondering that as well.
Here it is with the second coat. I let it dry for several hours between coats and it ended up taking 3 coats of paint.
This shows the bottom window which I cleaned up with a razor blade and the top one shows what the windows looked like after the paint but before the clean-up.
Cleaning the paint off the glass did make a mess but it was easily vacuumed up.
Here is the before and after right next to each other so you can see just how big of a difference the paint made. I like that the paint color still compliments the current wall color even though the wall color is nowhere near what color we are going to be painting it.
It’s just a little progress. But hey, progress is progress. It’s one more step toward making this house our home. Remember, “strive for progress, not perfection”.
These little ladies wanted to get in on the action when I was taking the After pictures of the door. I couldn’t say no, so please enjoy a picture of my little rag-a-muffins.
*Before you paint a door make sure to read up on technique. You can’t just slap it on there unless you want yucky results. A simple search on Pinterest for “how to paint a door” should help you find several tutorials.*