Garage Door Makeover

Ok, so first off, I’m sorry I’ve been MIA. I’m just having a hard time finding time to blog in this season. All my free time (when Bronny is sleeping) I’m using for projects (or teaching the older kiddos.) And most the time he is awake is just not a great time for typing. So it’s just not been happening. Right now I’m attempting to fit it in during “Oooo we just got new Play Doh! time.”

So Today I want to show you a project I am seriously proud of. (Unfortunately the photo quality isn’t to the level of pride I have for it, but I just wanted to get it shown.)

Because Befores and Afters NEVER get old…. Here’s our house before we owned it (Thank you Google Earth for the shocking truth!)

But where I really want you to look (I know…there is SO MUCH to take in) is the garage door.

 Because I need to show work in progress...

And this was us at the end of this summer.

I tried to find some close up photos I have of the garage door, but my computer wasn’t in the mood to load them. 

So you’ll just have listen for a minute instead. The garage door (well really the general garage area) is pretty much the first thing this house presents to a viewer. (Especially back when the yard was a jungle hiding the rest of the house.) And so when we pulled up to view this house, I immediately noted the garage as a point of change.

If you look from the picture above, to the picture below -- we did change the light fixtures. That made me SO happy. The old ones scale, light bulb placement, and color were so off for the house. These fit so much better.

Anyway...

The garage door itself is a material I’m not used to seeing as a garage door. It’s something like hardboard, but it’s got faux (large scale) wood grain. It’s really ugly. It wasn’t in great shape, but it’s still very functional.  

A bit ago I painted it flat black just to kinda hide some of it’s ew factor. And it worked well. The faux grain chilled out a bit, and the oldness hide itself.

Still old looking, but better, espeically from far away. (But I wanted to show you with this photo, what this door really is made of.)

But then...

One day, while brainstorming house stuff, I had a moment where I thought…Wait, if people add trim to doors inside their house to make them prettier without getting new doors….why can’t I do that to my garage door. I asked a smart DIY friend of mine what she thought about it’s possibility, and she thought that as long as it was not so thick as to get in the way of the door opening, and not so heavy as to make the garage door opening strain, it should be doable.

(I didn’t ask Blake at that moment because I had JUST asked him to do about probably 6 other house projects that week, and if this was just impossible I wanted to save him the mental effort of my requests.)

So then I started looking at garage doors and trying to figure out what I could add to mine to make it look nice.

Enter this look: (I’d show you think Pintrest pics I saved…but crabby computer says no.)

Blake bought hardboard, he cut it (And I think the store cut it a bit for us initially?) and we painted the backside for some extra water sealing out protection.

Then Blake did awesome math and cutting to create my plans. Then he glued the backs and then brad nailed the pieces into place.

\

After that I painted everything black and almost died of joy overload because it looked SO GOOD!

But we needed to caulk it all to keep water from getting behind it. There was mild drama initially because we couldn’t find a good caulk for what we were doing. The first one needed WEEKS to cure before we could paint and I didn’t like the glaring white edges staring at me for weeks and embarrassing me to the neighborhood. (I’m totally cool with my house looking like GARBAGE inside as we do these projects because I don’t have to show people until I am done, and wasn’t embarrassed by the outside’s badness initially because I knew we could change it. But I learned in this garage door process that I am not impervious to fear of judgement. Because this whole process what very much a risk (I found no other blog resources showing a project like this and I didn’t know if it wasn’t doing to fail big time), and I hated doing it in front of an audience. Even painting the door black was a design risk, and as people took their walks that day, I was so self conscience. I was so afraid it would be UGLY and that people would judge me for it. It was an interesting emotional experiment during this project.)

Anyway -- I wasn’t about to have white caulk pushing all those emotional buttons for a couple weeks. 

There was black caulk, but it wasn’t paintable (and we all know it wouldn’t be the SAME black, so it would ALWAYS show.) So that wouldn’t work.

But it turned out that we just needed to shop another store and found an exterior caulk that could be painted in a short amount of time.

So Blake caulked the door and I laughed inside about how it actually just kinda looked period appropriate. I feel like midcentury doors regularly accented the raised panels. (However, I did not want it to stay that way.)

Finally I got to go back over it again paint everything again. And it was good.

I mean, I really can barely stand how nice it wound up being.

Even that faux wood grain looks right now.


We did this a few months ago now, and I still crane my neck when coming and going from the house to watch the garage door from every angle and enjoy the crazy good improvement.



The garage door still works great.  It’s rained a bunch with no issues. And we saved big bucks just facelifting what we had.
I’m super happy about it.

We still have another project up our sleeve for the garage area visual improvement. But that might be a next year thing now because the weather finally cooled down.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

I’m still just giddy over this!!