Everyone has a front door, some people might even have 2. But we got extra lucky at the Merc and have 3 front doors! Updating your front door with paint is one of the quickest ways to bring some serious curb appeal to your house, but you have to do it the right way and you have to use the right kind of exterior paint.
Remember how we’ve talked about finding the right paint for the job and that paint is not a one size fits all type of product? When you are painting outside doors, you MUST use exterior paint. Want to see what happens when you don’t? This is at our family cabin. This door was painted with regular latex just 2 years ago. Can you see how much it’s faded and discolored? That friends, is why you need exterior paint.
Once we had our vintage doors for the Merc modified and hung it was time to get painting. We started by taping EVERTYHING off. Prep is wicked important, especially when youre using a paint sprayer.
The first step to painting raw wood is to prime it. Primer keeps the good stuff in and the bad stuff out. It preps the wood for paint and creates the best possible scenario for paint to adhere. It also helps even out the wood texture and is usually significantly cheaper than paint so it’s better to do 2 coats of primer + 2 coats of paint vs. 4-5 coats of paint.
The primer that we used is Sherwin-Williams Exterior Latex Wood Primer. It’s great if you’re using a darker color on your door (if you’re doing a lighter color you might want something with more stain blocking properties so the wood doesn’t bleed through and ruin your finish.)
The paint we used for our trim is Sherwin-Williams Emerald Exterior Satin in Tricorn Black (you can see all of my paint colors here!!) Make sure that you are painting on a breeze-free day. Otherwise you’ll end up with loads of treasures in your paint! There are some tricks to using Emerald Exterior paint. It’s very thick, which is good and also can be frustrating. We had to get a different tip for our sprayer because the paint was too thick for the smaller one. So that is lame. Emerald Exterior paint has a longer cure time than what you’re probably used to, especially if you’re only used to interior latex. This may seem like a negative until you watch the magic happen. When you spray (or roll) paint, especially thick paint, your immediate finish looks like this:
I get it. It’s textured, and freak-out inducing. BUT DON’T TOUCH IT!!! Channel every bit of patience that you have and walk away to let it dry. As the paint cures it will flatten out and dry to a smooth finish. If you leave it alone.
The day we decided to paint the front doors it was really windy and so instead of moving them out back to paint like we did with our back door we left them in place and sheeted off the opening. (This was before our interior doors were installed and we set up and entire room for painting)
A tip for painting if your door has moulding like ours, Don’t try to do it all in one pass, you’ll put too much paint on the surface and still miss parts of the trim. Instead, lower the output of your sprayer and hit each side of the moulding, then do a pass over the whole door.
Remember that texture-y up close picture above? This is what it looks like after it dries.
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via Mandi at How To Paint A Front Door + The Best Front Door Paint
