New doors...

One part of our painting project is to replace a damaged door. It isn't a door we use, but it is drafty and completely unpaintable. And since this whole project leads to painting the house and all the outbuildings, a new door was required.



The reason we don't use the door is obvious when you see it, but there is a backstory. Before we bought this place back in the 80's, the driveway came straight off the county road and up through the front pasture, leading to the front door. But after the surrounding farmland was subdivided into 2+ acre lots, a new private road was built on the opposite side of the house, so it made sense to start using the old kitchen door as the main entrance.

We made matters worse when we moved in, and discovered that a wrap-around porch was mostly rotten. One of the previous owners had built it using tongue-in-groove boards, and one day I came home from work to find DW in the middle of tearing it down, one board at a time. We ended up building a much smaller deck off the kitchen door, and with no deck leading to the old front door, it became unusable.

But the door still needed to be replaced. So one morning we set off to the door store in SoDo, and in five minutes flat we found the perfect door for our Craftsman farmhouse. So perfect, in fact, that we bought two of them, deciding to replaced our perfectly OK front door. It helped that the doors were fiberglass (which our painter recommended), and were half price because the leaded glass windows were set in crooked (which turned out to be a pretty easy thing to fix).

So I now have beautiful Shaker doors with leaded glass windows that bring light into the house. From the inside, I can look out to the patio and the gardens. And from the outside, the reflection of the trees is beautiful. I will have to wait until the end of the project to see them painted, and can hardly wait.