One blessing after another...: A-door-able

I have wanted a painted front door since for-EV-er. For some reason, we never got around to it at the old house (probably because the existing door was a decent neutral color that didn’t bother me too much.) The door at the new house, however, is a different story. It is a beautiful solid wood door. I love the glass and the panels, but the honey colored stain just didn’t seem to go with the exterior of the house AT ALL.

And it just got worse the closer you came. It was dingy and fading and did I mention that it just didn’t go? Kudos to whoever thought, “Mauve brick, orange door… yeah, that works.”

We also wanted to change out the hardware. I wasn’t a big fan of the gold finish, and Mom bought us a new lock & handle for a Christmas/housewarming present. I was chomping at the bit to replace the old with the new.

Speaking of Mom, she was here at the beginning of February and offered to wrangle some gremlins so that we could finally get this project done. As usual, I consulted a Young House Love blog post before we started… they just do a great job of breaking down projects like this step by step and giving lots of details. As suggested, we cleaned the door, removed the hardware, and gave everything a good sanding. Because we were dealing with wood that had never been painted before, we primed it first. Brian just asked the guy at the paint desk at Home Depot and he suggested this.

I taped off the outside edges and the hinges and then we slapped on one coat of primer. So far, so good.

Just the primer was a vast improvement, but I was super excited to bust out the paint. After digging around the internet googling things like “pink brick, painted door” I landed on the idea of painting it plum. I dare you to tell your husband you want to paint the front door plum. It goes something like this:

Me: “I’m going to pick out a dark plum color for the front door.”

Brian: “Plum? As in purple? You want to paint the front door purple?”

Me: “Yes.”

Brian: Silent stare. Wanders off into another room, pretending like the conversation never happened.

I interpreted that as a sign NOT to ask him to choose between the paint chips that I later brought home. Instead I just asked every friend that visited and they all agreed that Behr’s Aubergine (N100-7) was the way to go. (Side note – this is a discontinued color. They have a new paint chip called “Deep Aubergine” that is NOT the same. I think you’d have to give them the name and number at the paint desk in order for them to bring up the old formula.)

The folks over at YHL suggested Valspar Duramax Exterior Paint in a semi-gloss finish, so that’s what we used. Because I still had the old Behr paint chip from Home Depot, I just had the guys at Lowe’s color match it. We applied two thin coats. This paint didn’t require any sort of top coat, so we let her dry and called her done.

I feel like the old door only offered a weak "Hi there" to our visitors. The new door, on the other hand, says, "Come on in! Our door is purple and we want to be your friend!" It stops just short of Joey's "How you doin'?", because that would have been too much.