Front Door Makeover

April 19, 2016 by Ruthie 10 Comments

I’m a firm believer that anything can be fixed with a nice coat of paint!  Throughout our house, we have oak woodwork and trim.  It is such a large project to tackle so I’m trying to live with it as much as possible. I did cave and I ended up painting my kitchen cabinets though!  One other thing I couldn’t live with was the wood front door and the door to the garage…because it was painted on!  The previous owners decided to paint a wood-like finish onto the doors to match the rest of the house.  I guess it seemed like a good idea but it was very obvious it was painted and not actual wood.  It was one of the first projects I wanted to complete because I just couldn’t stand the look of it.  The outside of the front door was white so I also wanted to give our curb appeal a little bit more color.  I shared this project back in October over at Old House to New Home, you should go check out Amanda’s delicious blog full of recipes and DIY tutorials!

I didn’t feel the need to prime the doors because they had obviously been painted before.  I’m a creature of habit and I loved the color I used on my tiles in my kitchen and thought it would really look great on the doors and match the brick on the outside.  You can see my previous post, one of my favorites, about my Tile Transformation here.  Sherwin Williams is always our go-to for paint, it was a no brainer to me to choose the color called Backdrop.

I started by using a 4-inch foam roller but I didn’t like how it was applying to the door so I ended up brushing it on instead.  I applied one coat to both doors and waited 24 hours to apply a second coat.  The front of the front door was white so that required 3 coats of paint as the “fake” wood doors only required 2 coats.  This was the front door after one coat of paint.

Here are both doors after a couple of coats of paint from the inside…I apologize for all the iPhone pics!  As I had mentioned before this was one of the first projects I tackled in my home and I didn’t know the blog was in my future quite yet! 🙂

The worn gold hardware on the storm door was rusting so I touched them up by spray painting them with a brushed metal spray paint.  Plus it was outdated!  I taped around the fixtures with Frog Tape and spray painted it with Rustoleum Stain Nickel Metal Spray Paint.  It was a quick fix with a large impact in my opinion.

After the doors were painted and dry I was able to replace the hardware on the door.  I wanted to give my door a little extra character so I replaced the door handle with this beautiful set from Unhinge Hardware.  I love how it compliments my front door and really adds to the overall look of the front porch.

While in the process of painting the door we also painted the walls.  The darker gray on the door really compliments the lighter gray on our walls.  Outside the dark gray door also makes the gray undertones in our brick stick out.  It really compliments our brick nicely.  What a simple way to give your front door a facelift.  It not only looks great but it ups your curb appeal.

I love how the door turned out and definitely looks better than the “fake” wood.  The addition of the new hardware really enhances the beauty.  I’d love to get a new storm door eventually so that more of the beautiful front door is shown.  Thank you to Unhinge Hardware for providing the new door handle set and helping me complete this project!