This was the worst project I've ever tried.

Let's talk doors, shall we?

I've never liked my front door.  It's old (original to the house, so 50 years old now).  It doesn't fit right (you can see daylight on 3 of the sides, with LOTS of drafts too). And it's kind of ugly.

The previous owners painted it.  It doesn't look that bad from away:

But up close, it was an AWFUL paint job.

I  really want a new one.  But we're considering moving in the next couple of years, and I wondered if I could just get by redoing this one instead.  I thought I'd just strip off that paint and restain it.  Not really that big of a deal, plus I already had everything I needed.

Hahahahahahahahahahahaha - boy oh BOY was I ever wrong!

So here it is, mid stripping:

At this point, I had already spent close to 10 hours on it. I ran through all my stripper in the first coat.  Then I started scraping and discovered that there were NINE different colors of paint on this door.  I scraped and I scraped and I scraped.   As you can see, it was soooo ugly mid point.  One of my problems - I knew my hubby didn't want to do this.  Any big ish project, he just doesn't even want to think about it.  But if I take care of it while he's gone, he's just happy it's over and ok with the results.  And I started this only 36 hours before he came home.  I knew I HAD to get it done before he came back.

I bought more stripper - this time the stuff was supposed to go through 7 layers of paint.  It lied.  But it did get through about 5.  I tried standing it off (nope, my electric sander died instead).  I did everything.  Finally (after close to 20 hours of crazy crazy work), I just decided to give up and spray paint the whole thing. 

Of course, I couldn't get the pins out by myself. So I had to do it in place.  I taped off everything (and used 4 plastic drop cloths to cover the wall, ceiling, and floor all around it.  Then I did 4 coats of spray paint (light, about 30 minutes dry in between) and ended up with this:

I like this door SOOOO Much better now.  Ok, in this shot, it's not completely dry, and WAY not cured.  I left the door open like this all day long for almost a week (only closing/locking it at night). 

 

I'd even say it's awesome, until you look at it closely.  You can see every place that the old paint is still there. There's a ridge each time.  And some stripper got on the door knob, so it's really worn and ugly now.  In fact, it looks downright awful in person, up close.

 

But, BUT - I do like it better.  and it will work until we save up and replace it.  I'm thinking I'll paint the real new door the same color!