Why So Blue?

Our front door had the blues...big time. I am going to show you the after picture before because the before is soo bad.

I don't even have a definite before picture, but hopefully this picture will somehow help you figure out what it looked like. It had bad 70's plastic flower moulding in the middle of the squares. Take my word for it, it was bad.

We talked about just buying a brand new door, but after we both had sticker shock at Lowes one day we decided to see what we could do with the door ourselves. In all reality it s a really nice steel front door and the cheapest wood front doors we saw were around $200. I spent some time researching the proper way to refinish a steel door. It didn't seem like too hard of a process. I started by ripping off all the old moulding which left me with lots of holes to patch. Since the door was steel I couldn't just use any old spackling I had to use Bondo.

It is basically something you would use to repair scratches or dents in your car. So once we filled all the holes with the Bondo it was time to sand. This is probably where we made our one mistake. We put too much Bondo on the holes...we basically over-filled all the holes. We thought that would be better so then I could sand everything down nice and even. Wrong. I probably sanded that door for a good hour or two with a palm sander and it didn't look any different. And since my arm was numb by that time I knew this process wasn't going to fly. The directions said that this was the most critical step in the process of the re-do.

Basically once I primed the door the scratches or unevenness would show and it would be too late to fix. So we came up with plan B. We went to Lowes and bought some moulding and a thin piece of wood. We essentially wanted to cover the middle section and add some detail to the door, all whiule covering up the center section that wouldn't sand down. Once the door was sanded as much as it could be I used primer and then on came the color! It took me awhile to convince Cody our front door should be a fun bright color. He was a little hesitant but I just thought that a dark brown would be so ho-hum. At first I thought a green would be nice, then after holding up about 100 paint samples in the green/blue family against the siding, we both loved this color and thought it complimented the siding color.

The door took about 4 thin and even coats of paint that I put on with a small foam roller so you wouldn't see any brush strokes. Since we were upgrading the door it self I figured we might as well spruce up the door handle! We took off all the door hardware and I used a liquid de-glosser then primed them with a spray primer. Then I sprayed them with Oil Rubbed Bronze Rustoleum Spray Paint. I did about 4 coats waiting 30 minutes between each coat.

We used Liquid Nails to glue the piece of wood onto the door since we didn't really know how nails would be going into the steel door. We just used heavy stuff we had laying around the house to hold it down while it dried...including Cody.

Once it was down and dry, we added the moulding and I did a few last coats of paint on it. Since the door was now all spruced up it was time for the frame to have a little bit of a makeover. All our windows and trim on our house are dark brown so we wanted to keep things consistent. I primed the frame then did about 5 coats of paint on it.

This was defiantly a project that took a couple of nights and a weekend to do. But it was well worth it and a whole lot cheaper then buying a new front door! And I love the pop of color it adds to our house.