Front Door & Exterior Lights

I've been itching to paint our front door for sometime now. We have a standard steel door for both the garage door and the front door. The front door has several dents in it; however, replacing it was too expensive so I decided to give it a new coat of paint and call it good enough.

Enter choosing the color problems.

Dan and I don't quite see eye to eye on what color a door should be. There was nothing wrong in theory with our green front door. Besides being dirty and dented, the color blended well with the siding, roof, and landscaping.

It was just too safe.

On the other hand, our house is on the market, so I probably shouldn't get too crazy with the color choice. Eggplant, anyone?

So I brought home paint chip after paint chip. I must have gone to Home Depot to collect color swatches 5 or 6 times. I wish I'd taken a picture, I had quite the stack.

I was really drawn to something vibrant, like red.

Or turquoise, like this front door. Isn't that color to die for?? (Found here)

Dan didn't think so.

Enter sample paint. We finally narrowed our choices down to two colors: a light shade of green, still a nice earthy color and a light turquoise.

Both were nice in their own respect. I did like the green really I did. Dan and I both agreed that either was nice, but both needed to be darker. That sounded like a go-ahead with turquoise to me! So I went back to Home Depot for the bazillionth time in the last few weeks  to get the blueish/turquoise on the left 50% darker.

Time-out there's MORE to the story! I forgot to mention our hardware. It sucks. It's bronze/gold. It's ugly. It's tarnished. It's peeling. It's just plain yucky.

 

We tried to replace it when we first bought the house. However, we couldn't find one to fit in the holes already in the door. Our friend said those kind of handles are adjustable so that they fit into pre-drilled doors. Maybe they are, but the four we bought wouldn't fit.

Anyways...I've been reading more and more about spray painting door handles. It's tricky because it is such a high traffic item that the paint can wear off. I landed on this post one day which gave me the courage to give it a try. I decided that since they were exterior hardware, I'd better dot all my i's and cross all my t's. So I sanded, cleaned, primed 2x, paint 2x, then clear top coat. Don't they look lovely?

 

Oh WAIT! There's one more aspect to this re-do. The lights! I wanted to try my fancy spray painting trick on our equally ugly gold/bronze light fixtures. However, we determined that it was too much work taping all the glass or trying to remove it. So we bought three new ones in an oil-rubbed bronze finish so all the exterior fixtures will match.

Before:

 

After:

 

I'll post the finish products soon! The doors and hardware are drying in the garage as I write this. We need to wait until at least 8:45pm to put the doors back up. The hardware should get 3 days of dry time, but let's face it, that's not going to happen. 

I currently have bed sheets hung by straight pins keeping the bugs out of our house. Not a long term solution. Or even a one night solution. Those doors are going up tonight!

To be continued...