Side Door Face Lift

June 8, 2014 by Our Wolf Den 9 Comments

Our driveway runs in between our house and our neighbors which has earned in the nickname of the alley. After using it as a place to store extra supplies when a project is in mid swing we have decided that it is time to clean it up a little. There are a ton of small projects to tackle but the first one I set my teeth into was the side entry door.

The side door was anything but a pretty sight. It was old and discolored the door itself seemed to be steel that had never been painted.

The design over the glass was yellowed with gross caulk oozing out from under it.

It was embarrassing and needed to be dealt with. Unfortunately it had been easy to ignore these past few years.

I made the decision to paint the door dark gray. In fact it is the same dark gray we used on the front deck called Dark Granite (780F-6) by Behr. The waterproofing deck paint did a pretty good job the steel door.

When painting a steel door it is important to make the coats as light as possible, this will prevent drips and drops. The second coat I was able to do a little bit heavy but not much.

I also painted two coats on the inside of the door.

After these were dry I painted the design over the glass with some leftover Dutch Boy White Lullaby kitchen paint I had. Two coats of the white and I was able to scrape off the extra paint that was on the glass. I will admit that I had to go back a touch a few areas up. It seems my paint scrapper was built wrong for this area. In fact I did break a blade.

I didn’t have the patience to peel all the paint of the glass in one sitting so I took a break to paint a third coat of gray paint on the door. Unfortunately it rained right after I was done and a fourth coat was needed on the outside.

The wood work around the door also needed a fresh coat of paint. For some reason when we had the siding redone the “lovely” company we worked with did not cover all the exposed wood with aluminum that we paid for.  At that point we just wanted them gone and it wasn’t worth fighting with them to fix this. A few coats of waterproof paint in a bright white and it was as good as new.

What do you think, big difference?

It makes me much happier. We still need to find a storm door to replace the one original one that fell apart. Personally I’m likening the look of a glass one.

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