Front Entryways

Front entryways say a lot about a home and it's character. We wanted to give the exterior front entryway of our house a face lift but we didn't want to break the bank in the process. The house already had great stuff to work with such as a brick exterior, a flagstone walkway that leads to the front door, and the front door is the original heavy wood door with a unique brick archway.

As you can see from the pictures, the style of the house is a colonial. When I think of colonial I think of formal and we are far from being formal and so is our house.

The front door was painted white. We decided to strip the paint to the natural wood. The first thing we did was remove the door. This is one of those "Oops", we removed the door before we took a before picture. So here 's a picture of the door getting ready to be striped.

We removed the paint from both sides of the door, which was a full days job. The outside of the door had more layers of paint and took longer to strip. The inside of the door was pretty easy in comparison.

We kept the character of the door by doing very little to it after the paint was removed. We lightly sanded the outside of the door followed by 5 coats of polyurethane. We did not sand the inside of the door, we gave it 3 coats of polyurethane. The total process took an additional two days.

The hardware on the door was in good condition so to save money we removed the hardware and spray painted it black instead of purchasing all new.

The outside light above the door was too small for the entrance. We replaced the light with a hanging lantern we purchased online at outdoorlightingandmore.com.

I had looked at the local home improvement stores for a hanging lantern but could not find what I wanted at a reasonable price. Next I went online and was pleasantly surprised by the variety and prices I found. Even with the minimal shipping charge the lantern was less expensive than buying locally.

The archway above the door is concrete and had been painted white. I wanted copper sheeting for this area. Copper in small pieces is not easy to find and what I found on the internet was expensive.

Instead of real copper I used a hammered copper spray paint on the archway. To our surprise it turned out really well and it was very easy to use. It was also a lot cheaper, $6.00 for the can of spray paint verses $100.00 for the copper sheeting.

Next was removing the rusted and wobbly iron railings. We replaced the railings with benches that Greg made. To make the benches Greg used eight foot 2 x 4's cut in half, placed them three wide with three 1 x 2's running cross ways to hold them together. He finished them with trim molding on all sides. The benches are sitting on eight inch square cinder blocks.

The porch and benches were stained with what my friend calls "Oops" paint. We bought a gallon of wood deck stain for $5 at Lowes that was the wrong color for someone, but the right color for us. We didn't know if the wood deck stain would work on concrete but it did. The stain dried with no problem and the color looks good on the porch and the benches.

The project was completed by placing plants in colorfully painted galvanized buckets and sitting the buckets on the benches.

Moving on...........we bought a $9 metal mailbox from Lowes and spray painted it with the left over copper paint that was used for the archway. I trimmed the mailbox with black spray paint that was left over after painting the door's hardware. The post that the mailbox sits on was purchased at Restores for a couple dollars. Greg placed the post in the ground along with quick drying concrete.

We removed the peeling layers of paint from the threshold and stained the wood. We also painted the trim in areas of the house where needed.

The whole project took a couple weeks to complete. We improved the appearance of the house and saved a lot of money by working with what the house had to offer instead of making major changes. Below you can see the before and after pictures.

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