Our front door. The exterior. FINALLY.

Posted in DIY by Christina

Howdy, folks! So, I’ve decided to jump out of order with my posts this week because I’m SO ready to show you guys some updated exterior pics of the front of our house. Ya see, first I painted the rusty green gate to the courtyard a crisp black, then I painted our front door once it was installed… but I’m showing you the front door and exterior shots first. Because I’m excited. And it’s my blog. 🙂 Then, I’ll go back next post and give y’all a tutorial on painting our metal gate with befores and afters of that project.

So, onward…

If there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout this front door process it’s this. I am not meant to paint exterior doors. And also, some projects seem like they’d be straightforward… but they aren’t.

Either that or I just simply haven’t discovered the right paint yet.

Part of the problem, well, most of the problem is that our new door has no texture. It’s perfectly smooth. I love this about our door, but it definitely posed a problem when it came to painting it.

Painting the interior side of our door was a piece of cake thanks to the self-leveling property of the Proclassic paint by Sherwin Williams, but I didn’t realize until I was in the trenches with the outside of our door that most exterior paints don’t do that.

I’d thought about removing the door and spraying it, but it has a specific type of hinge that doesn’t allow the pin to be removed, and I was VERY hesitant about removing the hinges from the door frame after our old door practically fell off due to a stripped frame. So, I decided to go the old-fashioned way with a brush and foam roller.

Colorwise, I decided to paint the door the same charcoal color that I’d painted our old door (Black Bean by Behr) in their Exterior paint + primer. It worked well with our old door, but then again… that door had texture to it, so I never really noticed textural issues with the paint.

I followed the same process as when I painted our old door, but after 2 thin and even coats, I had brush strokes galore…

It doesn’t look that bad here because of the lighting, but trust me. It was visible from the street. Easily visible, in fact.

So, I decided to splurge on a $30 quart of Sherwin Williams Resilience paint matched to the same color…

Prior to painting, I busted out the sanding block and smoothed the finish across the entire door…

Then, I applied one thin and even coat of the SW paint…

Although there were still some roller marks visible, it was WORLDS better than finish with the Behr paint. Now, I should’ve just stopped here (an old joke in which a head of cabbage should’ve “quit while it was a head” is rattling around my brain right now). But, like many Americans these days, I figured that if one was good, two must be better. So, I painted another coat to “make it perfect”.

And I was wrong. So wrong. In my attempt to further annihilate the roller marks, I made them, like 50 times worse than they were with the Behr paint.

IF ONLY I COULD MAKE YOU SEE WHAT IT REALLY LOOKED LIKE. This picture doesn’t even slightly do it justice…

Again, you could clearly see the roller marks from the street. And it looked BAAAADDD. I think part of the issue is that our front porch isn’t shaded. We have only about an 18 inch overhang above it, so differences in sheen are more punctuated with the sun bouncing off of it. As for that fourth coat, I think my mistake was that I applied too much paint, thinking that it would self-level. It.DID.NOT. Plus, it had a very stippled, coarse texture to it.

At this point, I was quite dramatic. And I apologize to the cookies that will never again see the light of day.

That next morning, I woke up bright and early and busted out the sanders. This sander for the areas around the molding…

And the orbital for the flat areas…

I did as much of the sanding as possible with the door shut to limit the dust inside, then I opened it to get around the edges. I finished up with a sanding block to get any remaining rough areas…

My tips for painting prep post-sanding are as follows…

1. Remove as much dust as possible from your surface with a Swiffer rag first. This will prevent your final step (tack cloth) from getting gummed up faster than it needs to.

2. Clean all the dust around prior to painting. Everywhere. Shake out your drop cloths, vacuum loose dust. Just get rid of it. Fully clean prior to painting. Nothing is more frustrating than applying your paint only to have a random gust of wind or someone messing with your drop cloth accidentally blow dust onto your finish.

3. Right before applying paint, use tack cloth to remove all remaining specks of dust and debris from your surface. Tack cloth is magic stuff, my friends. It’s sticky and gets up everything. Keep a supply on hand.

After I’d completed all of the above steps, I applied another thin and even coat of paint to the door. This time, I applied the paint and then used LONG strokes from the top of the door to the bottom to eliminate as many roller marks as possible.

The result was better but still not perfect…

…but at this point, I basically claimed defeat and decided to leave it. I accepted that it would just have to be imperfect for the time being. And I was at peace.

But alas, the paint gods laughed at me.

I left the door open for ELEVEN hours (I finished painting that last coat at 9:30 am, and finally closed the door at 8:30 pm). And when I woke up the next morning, I opened the door (STTTTIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICCCCCKKKKK!!!!!! <- The door screaming at me). Aaaaaaand small bits of paint came off around the edge of the door. What the deuce???!!! After all of the coats that I’d painted before (after which I’d only left the door open for 4-5 hours post-painting). The paint DIDN’T BUDGE. But after I finally was okay with leaving the door as is (and after I’d left it open for almost half a day), it stuck and I lost bits of paint.

Oy. #morecookiesplease

So, I still need to paint another coat.

But in the meantime, the missing spots aren’t terribly obvious, so I’m gonna wait for my interior cheerleaders to reassemble and motivate me to repaint the door without crying.

And I’m gonna smile anyways and show you what I will call “after” pictures (as I listen to the smallest violin in the background). First, though lets look at the doorway when we closed on the house.

Now, it looks like this…

Painted gate, new front door, neater courtyard. Joey basically laid down cardboard to smother the weeds and then layered decomposed granite on top. The fact that the painted door looks better here than it had, just tells you what it looked like before. All in all, though, the courtyard is feeling more modern and much better kept. Eventually I’ll add some potted plants and such to gussy it up and add some color and softness.

We found that random brick (next to the door) in the courtyard after we moved in. It says “ST JOE” on it. Clearly the yard knew he was comin’. Haha! 😉 Sooner or later we’ll change out the lighting fixtures, but I’m being really picky since they’ll have to coordinate with the lanterns we choose. And honestly, I’m fine with them until I find the perfect replacement.

The hardware is this exterior door set that I picked up from Home Depot….

It’s modern and sleek and everything that I wanted for our door.

A view of the outside of the courtyard….

I think one of the BEST things Joey could’ve done was add that rock border and the nandena bushes to soften up the front. It’s so good. I need to either paint or replace those lanterns since they now pale in comparison to the gate. I was hands-down gonna paint them, but recently one stopped working. If we can fix it, I’ll paint it, if not, we’ll have to replace them. Like I mentioned before, we’ll eventually replace them anyways, but in the meantime they may as well look nice.

And now a before and current view of the house. Here she is on closing day…

And now…

We’re working on getting the grass to green up and we have a bit of hedge-trimming in store, but aside from that, things are starting to coming together. The orange roof is even starting to look slightly less offensive. It’s just amazing how the front door really makes such an impact. It was exactly what this house needed, in my opinion. I want to give the mailbox a little makeover with some of the charcoal paint (instead of that brown) to tie it in to the house, and the rotting wood shakes on top need to be replaced as well (I have some fun ideas for that). But these are relatively little things that we’ll knock out as we have the time.

So, that’s our exterior house update at this point. Does anyone have any suggestions for getting that front door more uniform? Since I have to do another coat anyways I’m open to all suggestions.

29Apr2015

Some REAAALLLLY Before and After pics

Posted in House Tour by Christina

Guys.

Sheesh.

I’m fed up with our desktop.

I took some “after” pics of one of the projects I’ve finished lately (About 5 more projects to shoot… Heehee! Not sure why taking “after” pics has been such an issue lately…).

And my desktop wouldn’t load them. Arg! Something’s been up with it for months now and it’s driving me batty. I need to take it somewhere to get it looked at, I’m sure. I just haven’t gotten to it yet.

Anyways, in the meantime, I’ve been trying to do some research on our house to find out what it looked like way back when. Supposedly, our wet-bar actually had a peninsula at one point and I’m positively DYING to see it. Unfortunately, although I’ve turned up several before-our-time “before” pics from old realty listings, that wasn’t one of ’em. (sadface)

But, here’s what I’ve got. Are you ready for this???

I give you our house in 2004:

Whoa!!! Right??? It actually looks cottage-y with that wood shake roof. I always imagined that our house originally had a tile roof. It would’ve definitely explained why they chose to put an orange roof on the house upon replacing it. Turns out, they came up with the orange on their own. It was chosen to go with the gold and green color-scheme. You can kind of see it in this blurry aerial shot…

Our. Poor. Neighbors.

Once the house went into foreclosure for the second time in 2012, the bank had the house sprayed beige, which is how it looked when we purchased it 2 years later…

And the last time I actually took pictures of our house’s front exterior it looked like this…

Now, keep in mind… we’ve since replaced the front door (I still have one more coat of paint to apply before I take pics) and I’ve given that green gate a nice, crisp coat of black paint (one of the projects that I’ve yet to photograph). But, in this pic, we’d painted the exterior, added landscaping and a rock border, and (in this shot) had painted our old front door.

The crazy thing is that in 2012, when the owners before us bought the house, the front courtyard had not one, but TWO metal gates…

Anybody else picturing every haunted house movie ever made??

The owners right before us removed the second gate after they moved in. This is on the day that we closed…

And the courtyard the last time I photographed it with our old door still (new pics coming soon)…

It definitely doesn’t scare the children as much. (Though, we still got no trick-or-treaters to my knowledge)

As a reminder, here’s the new front door (kinda… this shot is from when they’d installed the door with incorrect door-swing and I’d only partially painted it). The correct door has since been installed. It looks the same, just with the door knob on the other side and is currently in the process of being entirely painted that charcoal color…

I can’t wait to show it to y’all now.

In 2012, the backyard had not one, but two chain link fences…

The first, which was next to the patio, had been removed prior to us moving in, but the posts hadn’t. So, Joey had the fun task of extracting those guys. I was also surprised to see in these pictures that there were park benches on top of the nasty railroad ties (which had also been removed by the time we came into the picture). We removed the railroad ties and replaced the retaining wall with stone. And here’s that space today…

This view of the backyard looked pretty much the same as when we bought it. I just forgot to take “before” pics prior to Joey removing the second chain link fence seen to the left of the pic…

And the space now…

Inside, the kitchen looked pretty much the same in 2012 as it does now with the exception of the popcorn on the ceiling and paint color (which the owners before us removed/changed)…

The surprising thing here was that the slate floors were already in. I thought that the owners right before us installed them, but apparently it was the owners prior to them.

Our kitchen now is still kind of a mess. We haven’t gotten there yet, but we anticipate a full reno down the road. Our next big purchase, though, will likely be new appliances since the current stove and dishwasher are constantly on the fritz (and the fridge is a total black hole visually… but at least it’s a black whole that actually works (knockonwood!))…

Remember how I mentioned a while back (in this post) that there was a flood last year that necessitated a full gut of the laundry room by the previous owners? And how I griped about the lack of storage we currently have?? Well, there used to be some…

Too bad they didn’t reinstall those uppers, but they did replace the doors. And I guess we now have a blank slate to work with, which could be good…

Here’s the living room in 2012…

It’s amazing how a view of a chain link fence out the window makes one feel imprisoned. Like Morgan Freeman should be narrating your tale of woe.

The owners before us painted the walls, de-popcorned the ceilings (blessthem), and replaced the slider. We installed the floors and painted the built-ins…

Another view…

The master bathroom had pretty amazing black sinks in 2012, no?

Mighty epic commitment to the black bathroom fixture in this house (you know what I mean if you’ve seen our guest bath).

The paint looks white in the above shot, but it’s hard to tell if that’s correct since if you look in the reflection next to the coffin-shower, the wall does look peachy. In any case, someone painted the room peach. ON PURPOSE. I mean, I know peach was really popular in the 80’s, but it was never really my thing. Especially when paired with navy/purple/mauve swirled marble. As a reminder of how it looked when we took possession (after the previous owners changed out the sinks and faucets)…

PEACH.

I couldn’t take it, so in a burst of unconstrained rage, I painted the room white…

A full gut will happen in this space if it’s the last thing I do!

(And yes, I’m constantly crossing my fingers that Bath Crashers magically appears at our doorstep)

The remaining rooms were basically the same in terms of upgrades. Prior to our buying of the house, the owners before us de-popcorned the ceilings, painted the main living spaces, changed out the doors, as well as a few lighting fixtures. The rest, we did. Now, I know I’ve been emphasizing this throughout this post, but just keep in mind as you’re going through these pics that these “befores” are from two years before we bought the house. Our “befores” that I took on closing day, can be found in our House Tour page.

The dining room, then….

And now…

(We added laminate flooring, shelves and curtains, I painted the table white, added some vintage-inspired art, and styled the shelves)

The master bedroom, then…

and now…

(I painted, we replaced the carpet and windows, and started decorating. Lot’s more to go. But I like where we’re headed.)

The guestroom/office then…

And now…

Believe it or not, those are totally different wall colors (peach vs. greige) although the photos look somewhat similar.

And finally, the hangout room, then…

And now (well, now-ish… this is another space that I need to photograph as it currently is)…

(Check out this post, which incorporates painting and decor for this room. )

The carpeting in the bedrooms was the same in 2012 as when we bought the house, so apparently the asphalt we found poured beneath the carpeting in this room was done before then. Remember that???

I still think it’s the weirdest thing EVER. I mean, what the heck? #stopthejimmyhoffajokes

So, anyways, I hope to find more pics somewhere along the line of the house further back. I would LOVE to see it as it was originally, actually. It seems like the house changed significantly just since 2012 (let alone that exterior shot from 2004) so I can’t imagine what it used to look like at the get-go. Also, it’d be remiss of me not to mention that this house seems like a total team effort. It’s slowly gotten it together, first with the slate floors from 2 owners back, then the improvements made by the previous owners, and now us. Despite any differences in taste (or lack of maintenance over the years), I feel like (at least in the recent years), good intentions were had to improve the house and bring it back to life. And hopefully, we’ll be able to continue with that mission for a time to come. Because I love our house. I’ve never felt so grateful or “at home” than I do now.

So, tell me is anybody else nosy like me?? Trying to snoop around in your house’s past to see what it looked like? Any ideas on how I could get my hands on older pics??