Bang! Painted front door and trims and new storm door and stuff!
As you know, we have been working on the exterior of the house a lot since we moved in. Part of the reason is that Colorado winter is harsh, so we want to fix the exterior as much as we could during summer time. We also like to drive up and feel that the house is different – more ours – and exterior upgrades offers a more dramatic change of the feel of the house. Especially to our neighbors, who cannot not see what we have done inside, some exterior upgrades makes them feel that we are taking care of our property.
Since we moved in 7 weeks ago, we have
- weeded the front yard and trimmed the tree in the front;
- removed the flower bed next to our foundation;
- taken off the broken storm door;
- replaced the porch light;
- relocated mail box and house numbers;
- taken off the rusted metal awning; and
- demo-ed the sinking front porch.
All these effort surely made our front yard look better. This was the house front when we moved-in:
And this was the front of the house after our first round of clean-up:
And this was a few days ago:
I think we have probably earned 20% curb appeal at this point – am I too generous giving myself credit? I will take 15% for sure.
And today, we finished another big upgrade to our front entrance and I think this one really changed the look of the ranch for better! Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new front door!
To be more precise, these are our new front storm door and our newly painted front door.
which is a far cry from what we inherited:
As far as the front doors go, we need both form and function. Unfortunately, the old combo offers neither. Let us talk about form first – the black on white color combination and the prison-like bars really did not speak for our style. Our living room is fairly dark, so we preferred keeping the front door open with the storm door closed when we were at home. And the old storm door made us feel that we are in a cell! It does not help that our neighbor is a cop and his police car parks right outside of our door!
We also wanted to change the color of the front door to a darker tone. Our brick is beige with orange tones – not something we are crazy about but something we have to deal with. And one way of dealing with it is not to have something white. We would like to use a darker color with cooler tone – something like steel gray or shotgun black – on the our window trims and doors.
The front doors we inherited are also lack of function. For one, the weather stripping was worn and the door threshold was badly cracked (you can see some of the cracks from the photo above). The door frames were also cracked and with tons of old nail holes:
The screen on the storm door was broken, and it did not lock properly anymore.
We took down the bad storm door shortly after move-in. So the first step for us was to get a new storm door that offers both form and function. Unlike the one in the back, we do not need to have doggy door installed, which gives us the option of a full-view storm door (the ones with a full glass panel). As I said before, our living room is fairly dark, so we would like to keep the front door open when we are at home and let in some light through the storm door. A full panel of glass will surely let in as much as light possible.
And this was our pick:
This Larson storm door comes with half a dozen colors, which made us scratching our heads a bit. The truth is, we knew that we would be painting the front door darker, but we had not decided on the color yet. We also wanted the storm door to disappear against the front door, which means the trim color of the storm door should be similar to the color of our future front door…you see the problem here!
Fortunately, although they offer six colors, pre-stocked doors in Lowe’s that day offered only two colors – white and smoky black. We knew that we did not want white, so black we went. Honestly, I would describe this color as “shotgun black”. I actually saw this color once on a muscle car in California and I loved it. It was almost black, but has a powdery feeling to it. After talking to the owner of the car, he told me that he had the car custom-painted to a “shotgun black”. And today I saw it on this door!
Now we had a storm door picked, the next step was to decide which color to paint the front door. We could either go with a bold color, such as red, or color-match the storm door trims and paint it dark. it is always hard for me to imagine in my head, so I went on Pinterest:
This is what bold color with dark storm door look like:
And this is the “black on black” look:
The bold color door was a bit too busy to us. We want the front entrance to look simple, so color-matching we chose. I took a separate trip to Lowe’s with a piece of trim from our new storm door and hope to find a color that is close enough. To my surprise, the staffs there created a can of paint custom for me in the exact color of the storm door trim! I did not know it was possible and now our other paint projects are gonna be so much easier!
I then moved on to decide the color for the trims (I know, so many decisions) – white vs dark. After flipping through Pinterest, I found some looks I liked and listed them side by side:
White trims – 1
White trims – 2
White trims – 3
I think the key to these picture is how the trim color plays with not only the door color, but also the color of the house. All the white door trim pictures I like have darker house color, so by sandwiching in between the dark house and the dark door, the white trim really pops. The trims themselves also have to be beefy and well-finished to pull it off, because they are gonna become the center of attention.
On the other hand, the dark trim pictures I liked all have lighter exterior walls. In this way, the trims look like part of the front door, and it is easier to hide imperfections if there is any. It also make the front door look bigger/taller.
Black trims – 1
Black trims – 2
Black trims – 3
Black trim – 4, with storm doors!
And just like the last photo shows, thinner and plain trims would also work, because all the attention now is on the contrast between the door combination and the house.
Here are a couple examples of light color houses with white trim and dark doors. I felt that doing so only makes the front door look smaller.
Our brick color is almost the same as that in the last picture, and our trim is thin and aged. You can see that why white trim would not work for us.
Once we made the decision to paint both the front door and trims dark, it was work time! First, I chipped off the loose paint and old silicone around the door frame, and gave it a good TSP wash:
Slav put in some screws to hold the broken frame, and I patched the holes:
I then took the door bell and hardware off, and gave our front door a good wipe with TSP to prepare it for painting:
Our front door has a glass panel on the top, which cannot be taken off. But the frame of it could be removed easily.
We decided to keep the inside of the door white to match our interior walls. I put on one coat of primer and two coats of paint on the front:
Then I painted the frame of the glass panel:
Slav applied new silicone around the door before I painted the trims dark. It took us almost a day but it was well worth it!
Slav then installed new door threshold and the storm door:
I was attacked by this vicious pitbull when I took this pictures…
We paired this handle with our new storm door:
Annnnnd…all done!
No more prison-like bars:
And so much more light! It is almost like there were no storm door there!
The dogs absolutely adore the new storm door. They have been glued to this spot people/dog watching. Lots of neighbors walk their dogs on our street in the mornings and evenings. Roxie and Charlie’s tails are getting tired wagging!
What do you think NOW? Our neighbors loved it and a few of them stopped by and complimented on how much we have improved the front – do we deserve a 30% on our curb appeal? Give me a score!
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