Kitchen Door

Before (boring!)

The door is a cheap solid core wooden door designed to meet the minimum criteria for a fire door to allow escrow to close. Kind of a nice door, but the finish is poor and the construction is slipshod like you find on many doors of this price range. If anyone recognizes the brand of the door, please disregard the above statements :). The door will be painted forest green and white, both glossy. Glossy paint cleans up really easily (great in a kitchen or bathroom) but also shows imperfections like crazy. Make sure you sand everything very smooth.

Removed

Here I've removed the door. The spring loaded hinge in the center is going to be fun to re-install. Kind of like a mousetrap. The cats are loving the free access into the garage.

Masked

After sanding the door to remove the worst of the sharp edges from the router and construction, Stacy masked the parts of the door that will be white off from the parts that will be green. I can't wait to see how well this worked.

With Green!

Here is the first coat of green paint applied. It needed two to smooth out the wood and give a nice glossy coat.

Here you can see the masking removed from around the green. Each area had a few little drips and runs under the masking tape. This happened I think due to the heat and the extreme dryness of the door -- the tape just let go in a few small areas. This is easily fixed however.

Here Stacy is sanding the areas that will be white. This is both to get them nice and smooth and not so incidentally remove the largest part of the green drips and runs. Here also is a before and after picture showing how well the green was removed. Although the white would probably cover the green well, it would have taken more coats and left small but very visible lumps. I hate glossy paint because it shows every little screw up in surface preparation.

The Mask II

Unfortunately, Jim Carrey won't work for our wages. Subbing for him is the lovely Stacy with more masking tape, this time over the green areas. The tape is burnished (rubbed) with her fingernail against the green to minimize breakthrough of the white

With White paint!

Here is the first coat of white paint (first of 4 actually). A lesson learned here is the importance of many thin coats. Stacy put the white paint on a bit heavy in some places because the wood was so dry and sucked the paint into it. This didn't dry as quickly as it should have due to the thickness of the paint, so we've let it sit for a few days in the baking heat to make sure it was ready for the next coats. The second coat requires that the glossy sheen from the first coat be removed. Here is Stacy doing just that, and also painting the second coat.

Unmasked!

Once the masking was removed we, of course, discovered that some of the white had run under the masking and spoilt the green. How . . . unfortunate. Here is Stacy working with a fine brush to restore the crisp green line.

Here is the kitchen door at last. Or at least the kitchen side of it. Note the beautiful contrast of the bright white and the forest green. OK, so you can't see the colors well in this pic, the light is bad and my camera overexposes everything with the flash. When it is installed you'll see a pic of how beautiful it is. If you come over, please comment on it. Stacy deserves more praise than this site for dealing with oil based paint. Blegh.

Two pics of the garage side of the door. The first is Stacy lost in thought as she ponders getting the Saran wrap, used to keep her brush from drying out over dinner, off the brush without touching the paint saturated plastic to anything important. The second is her working on the second white coat. Much faster than the other side. As a final note, the door was so poorly constructed we had green paint seep through a panel joint and end up on the garage side. Yuck.

The Next Steps

A few more coats on the garage side and we will be ready for re-installation. Yay! Almost done, maybe next weekend.