Reviving Our Home’s Charm: Unveiling the Hidden Beauty of our Front Door

So I know that we haven’t posted a project in a couple of weeks but we have been very busy with a couple of projects that we are so excited to share with you all. So the first is one that I had been wanting to start from the moment we looked at the house.

What is the first thing that you notice when you go to someone’s home? If you guessed the front door, then you would be right. When we first walked up the steps at the open house I noticed that the front door was painted a dark shade of green but under that paint it was solid wood, and I wanted to see what it looked like.

After we bought the house, I started doing some research on the best way to strip the paint off the door. Since the house was built in the 1960s, there was some concern about some of the paint containing lead. We did a significant amount of research on how to remove the top layers of latex paint.

We settled on the product Citristrip. I had been skeptical about the product since the product packaging makes it look like it is an environmentally friendly version which usually means they don’t work as well. After reading a blog comparing it to 2 other popular paint strippers, it was clear that it was actually better than the others.

I applied a thick coat to the backside of the door and wrapped it in plastic wrap and let it sit overnight. The next day, I started scraping the top layers of paint off and found more layers than I had expected. So I put another coat of the paint stripper on, wrapped it up, and waited until the next morning.

The paint still didn’t want to fully come off so I spent the next 3 days sanding and scraping the remaining paint off. In the end, I was able to get the majority of it off but not without some damage to the door around the details. In the end, we revealed a beautiful maple wood. The weather started to get warmer so we put the door back on until we could finish the back half.

Now that fall has set in and the days are cooler, we took the door down again and I applied more of the same paint stripper to the back half of the door and wrapped it up. This side had only a couple layers of paint so it was much easier to complete. I filled all of the areas that got damaged with Minwax Color-Matched wood filler and sanded them smooth.

We wanted to stain it with a nice warm brown so we chose English Chestnut by Behr. The wood took the stain beautifully. Since the door has the intricate details, we used a spray polyurethane to avoid drips. After it dried, we hung the door and added a new modern door handle set.

Our front door’s transformation has been quite the journey, and we’re excited to share it with all of you. Stay tuned for more updates and home improvement adventures.