New black (back) door

Welcome to Monday and the WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS!! Ahhh, everybody freak out!! I have purchased maybe three presents. THREE. I’m usually late on that anyway but the arrival of our grandbaby has slowed down my process even more. (Thanks for the love on that by the way.)

So here’s two big confessions about the way I blog/DIY – one, I usually don’t know what I’m going to write each day till usually the day before. I don’t plan it out. If you haven’t noticed I’m a procrastinator (see above) and I do better when I fly by the seat of my pants. As of yesterday I had no idea what I would write about today, this is nothing new.

The other thing is that most of what gets done around here gets finished so I can blog about it. Otherwise we would live in a constant state of undone projects. We do anyway, but it would be way worse. So yesterday I decided to finish up a project that had been kind of started for a couple weeks…so I could blog about it. :)

It started with the back door:

Innocent enough, right? Well if you read this post, you’d know it’s not innocent. Not at all:

It makes for a good story – I can tell it without twitching now.

Well for years now we’ve had issues with water and that back door. I mentioned a while back we had to cut out the floor back there, down to the basement, to try to fix it. It helped for a while but water kept leaking down to the basement behind a wall. It would wick up on the baseboards – that’s the only reason we knew anything was going on.

The handyman told us years ago the whole back door would need to be replaced, so a few weeks ago when we had water leaking again we finally scheduled it. Let me tell you – this is not a cheap job. Yowza. So I finished up a lot of the detail work myself.

But when they installed it they couldn’t find another atrium door with the plastic grids we had before. So we planned on using the old ones on the new door, but when they put it up without I was kind of in love. It was so bright and open, but so different than what we were used to. I went to Instagram to ask opinions:

And I think pretty much every person said no grid and I agreed. I couldn’t believe how much more open it made that kitchen nook feel. It was crazy!

So we left them off and I seriously love it. As I said, I decided I would finish it up to save some money. All I really had to do was paint the door and the new trim – easy right? Painting a door and trim is actually about 15 steps though, so it took a while.

I primed it with gray primer a couple weeks ago:

And it sat like that till yesterday. :)

Then I puttied the holes on the new trim:

Then did one coat of black on the door:

See that new trim? I’m on a mission to change it out in the whole house! You can see how I do it here – it’s way easier than I thought it would be. Buh bye skimpy trim. Don’t let the back door hit you…

Then it was time to caulk every single corner and joint:

I shared the tool I use when I caulk here – it helps a ton!

Then finally, three more coats of paint – one more coat of black on the door, one coat of white primer and one coat white paint on the trim. It still needs one more of the white but for now I’m good:

Love that beefy trim!

I can’t finish up the black on the door till it warms up a bit. I didn’t do the side of the door at all because it. was. freezing:

This shot makes me want to rip out those itty bitty baseboards even more! Have to get the door trim done on each door first. I still have to touch up the hinges too – I spray painted them but didn’t spray them both open and closed so I didn’t get all of it. Duh.

It’s so different (to me) but I love it. Before there were LOTS of grids – on the door, on the windows and on the pantry door. This is much calmer and as I said, it makes the space feel bigger:

Although I still walk in the kitchen and for a millisecond of think the door isn’t there. That door debacle may have scarred me after all. ;)

Another project (mostly) done – and fingers crossed no more leaking! It was just in the nick of time too, we’ve had snow covering the deck since it was installed.

I loathe water issues, have I mentioned this? They seem to love us though. Do you have one of these atrium doors? With or without the grids?