The Door Reveal

Like I said in this post I've been working on replacing my kitchen door. This is what we started with.

I did some creative cropping to make sure you didn't see all it's yuckiness in that post. The window was small. The bottom was peeling and chipping away. It was a hollow core door for Pete's sake!

It all started as a great idea. Don't they all? Well, it proved to be a great idea in theory but was a total booger to go from idea to reality. If you didn't read my last post, I found a solid wood door with a great double-paned window sitting beside a dumpster. It's bones were great, but it needed some serious TLC. My mom and I thought it was going to be a quick swap out with a few little adjustments. Wrong! I sat the saw horses out and we get to measuring how much we need to cut off of it. As mom is measuring, I ask her if she thinks that this yucky film on it was going to come off. She says, "well, dummy, get the Windex and try to get it off." Duh! It wasn't coming. We realize that the filmy gunk was on the inside of the 2 panes. Crap! Just a minor set back, right? Nope. We took the frame off the glass, carefully took the glass out, cut the seal, separated the glass and began to clean it.

We tried everything under the kitchen sink and 1/2 of the things in the garage to get it off and it wasn't coming. Let me save you some time here. If you have a hazy film on a piece of glass the following will not work to remove it... Windex, Tooth Paste, Baking Soda, Finger Nail Polish Remover, Mineral Spirits, Tilex, Clorox, Super Clean, Sand Paper or Razor Blades.


Ugh, by this point I was thinking we were going to have to hang the old yuck door back up. Mom asks me if it would be okay if we just used 1 pane. For some reason, the film was only on 1 side. I conceded that 1 pane in a pretty door was better than yuck door so we proceeded. Don't get me wrong. When I say we, I mean Mom! So, she removed one pane of glass and reinstalled the good pane and replaced the frame. It's funny how 2 hours of frustration can be summarized in a paragraph. It was so much more frustrating and tragic than I could ever explain.

So now that we have the door reassembled, we shaved off a hair on the width and the length and started cutting out the places for the new hinges.

I did 2 of three of them. Guess what? Two of three are screwed up. I got a little saw happy and cut away too much. In the end you can't tell and if anyone comes to my house and does happen to notice, I'll give them a cookie and a cup of shut the heck up. We finally get it hung and I began cleaning all the gunk off of it.


Then I filled the little cracks with wood filler. Wood filler, you are my friend!


After sanding it a little bit, it was time to paint. You remember the plant stand that I rehabed from the dump here well, I loved the Krylon color "Italian Olive" so much I color matched the paint to Valspar's "La Fonda Territory Green".


Here are the color codes if you love it too!


As soon as I brushed on the first stroke, I was smitten. Goodbye yuck door. Hello pretty glass paned door. I think I hung a wreath on it before it was even dry.

I decided to cut our house numbers out of vinyl to put on the bottom of the glass. Since 3 little numbers would have looked a bit goofy on that huge piece of glass, I spelled them out. Yes, my house number is 123. It always makes me laugh in that irritated kind of way when I have to give people my address and I say 1-2-3 and they say really? No, I just made that up to be cute. Seriously...

As much work as it was (about 8 hours worth but who's counting?) I love it. It was totally free, except for a quart of paint, and who doesn't love free, right?



Excuse the chipping paint and lack of painted trim work. I pressure washed our stairs and sidewalk last week and haven't painted them again yet.

Okay, so now the dilemma... Do we put blinds or curtains on it? I say no. Our house sits up higher than the street, we are the 2nd house from the end on a dead end street that gets barely any traffic but hubs says it needs something. Of course he's thinking privacy and security and I'm just thinking about how curtains or blinds will take away from whatever wreath/decor I have on the door at the time.

What do you have on your glass paned doors? Have any suggestions for me?