Front Door Project

 The story starts like this.  We live in a rental.  And while our landlords mostly let us do decorating and design at our discretion with minimal interferrance, we don’t exactly want to dump a ton of money into a home that we don’t own.  That is why, we didn’t just replace this front door completely.

 This is the before.  Notice the lovely 60’s plastic door panels, the broken screen door propped up by flower pots and the lovely purplish, mauvish trim paint.  Also my dying flower basket.

This is our deadbolt.  It has a key broken off in it.  Awesome.

My first task was to remove the screen door.  It needed to go partly because it was hanging by a thread... 

 The screen itself was no longer really attached to the door frame.  (I actually accept my mail through this hole.  How sad.

 It took awhile but I did finally get the screen door removed.  It is now sitting in our side yard.  Leaning against a tree.  It’s art.

My next task was to remove the plastic panels which had obviously been removed and reattached several times.  What you see here in the photos is glue.  Originally they were attached with pegs through the door.  The door is metal by the way.  But it’s hollow, with styrofoam in the middle.

Now it’s time to patch the hole’s left by the little panel pegs.  I used Auto Body Filler because the door is metal.  No amount of spackle is going to fix this.  It took FOUR coats of filler because as it dried, it sunk into the holes and left dents.  In the end there are still dents but I stopped caring at about the 3rd application.

I bought a pint can of $5 clearance paint at Walmart.  Black satin exterior to be exact.  It took four coats.  I also bought matching spray paint to make the trim go faster.  Funny story, I found dog food on the top of the door jam.  We don’t own dogs.  We have never owned dogs.  Weird.

For a bit of sparkle, I purchased this kick plate at Home Depot.  It was $18 and was bright ugly bronze.  I spray painted it a hammered bronzy color.  I also purchased a door knocker on ebay for $6 and painted it the same color.  I have not attached it yet because my fall wreath is hanging right now.

I bought the supplies for these little topiary’s at JoAnn’s Craft Store.  All were on clearance.  And then I built them.  Because I’m awesome like that.

Done!  Not really.

The door is actually not finished.  Aside from the door knocker, we still have to install the new doorknob that the landlords bought for us.  The problem?  I don’t think they will work/fit in our door.  Doorknobs are complicated, holy smokes!  Beyond me anyway.  We’ll see what hubby has to say once he gets his hands on them.

Project synopsis:

Cost:  $42 (not including wreath, topiaries or the doorknob which we didn’t have to pay for)

Time: About a month with several weeks of absolutely no progress.  Probably could have done it in about 3 days to allow for drying time.  I just got sick of working on it and left it for days weeks at a time.