Recently I shared with you our updated porch as part of the Lowes Creative Blogger “curb appeal” challenge.  As part of it, I finally had the courage to paint my door black, which I have wanted to do for a long time now.  Today I would like to share with you and show you… how to paint a door.  Several of you had questions about the paint and the tools we used so I am going to try and answer all of them here.

First off, I wanted to share a before picture with you so you can see the door before and after painting.  And yes…that is a Christmas wreath on my door…in May…(don’t judge…hehe)!

My husband and I took a little trip to our Local Lowes store and talked to their paint department about the best paint for our front door.  With their recommendations we decided to go with an oil base paint for better durability and overall finish.  We chose the Rust-Olem brand in a satin black finish.

They also told us about Penetrol by Flood, which you can add to your paint which helps the paint not to dry so quickly which can help eliminate brush and roller marks.  This was really important to me as I wanted a nice smooth finish which can be hard sometimes when using a brush and a roller.  You could choose to spray your door with a paint sprayer but we don’t have one so that was not an option for us.

Let’s get started:

1.  Wipe down door and wipe off any grease marks or stains.

2.  Remove the door hardware.  This is optional, but your painting will be easier without them.  We took ours off since we were replacing our 35 year old hardware.  Think about drying time if you are removing your door hardware though as your house will be unsecured when the door handle is off and when you can put your hardware back on.

3.  Lightly sand over surface of the door and prime if the door has any imperfections or areas that may need some attention.  Also you will need to do this if you are painting latex paint over an oil base or vice versa.

4.  Tape off any areas you don’t want to get paint on like door hinges, windows, trim and door hardware.

5.  Use good paint tools.  We love the Quali-Tech Ultra Smooth High Density Foam roller and the angled Purdy paint brushes.  I used the 2 inch size for my door.

6.  When you start the actual painting with the primer (if you are priming) and the paint, be sure to paint the door panels in the proper direction.  This will help with the overall smoothness in the final painted finish.

7.  I start painting the inside of the panels shown here in the red and the #1.  Paint in a circle in the direction of the arrows with your paint brush.  Be sure to paint slowly and watch for drips which can happen easily in these sections…especially the corners.  Then move on to the next panel until all the insides of the panels (the squares and rectangles) have been painted.

8.  Now quickly move on to painting the raised panels and the middle stripe of the door in blue marked with the #2.  I use the roller for these flat sections.  Roll them smoothly and make sure that where you end and pick up the roller that there is not a big thick line of paint.  Be sure to lightly roll this out so that there will not be a noticeable line when finished.

9.  Now roll the area horizontally between the top and bottom panels.  Be sure to following the direction of the arrows for the green section marked #3.

How To Paint a Door

10.  Now for the final section, you will need to paint around the entire outside of the door following the yellow arrows marked with a #4.  Be sure to paint vertically on the outside left and right sides and then horizontally on the top and bottom areas.

Your door will need to dry completely in between painting your different coats of paint.  We needed a total of three coats of paint for it to be the nice finish we had been wanting.  I made sure to paint the door when I could spend all day at home for a couple of days.  I painted the door first thing in the morning so that it had time to dry all day long before putting the dead bolt back on at night so we could lock it up.

Then we added the finishing touches with some nice new hardware from Lowe’s which included the new dead bolt and door handle and a matching kick plate.  I LOVE the extra touch the silver kick plate added to the overall look, plus it covered up some dings and dents that were in the bottom of our door.

I threw on some house numbers which I cut with my Silhouette CAMEO to finish it off.

And…I finally put away the Christmas wreath.  I figured it was probably about time…don’t you? Ha!  I whipped up this other wreath with some stuff I already had on hand and will share with you how I did that in a later post.

I feel like the color of someone’s front door can tell a lot about their personality.  What about you?  What color is your front door?  Is it the color you want it to be?  If you could paint it any color you wanted, what color would you paint your front door?