a-door-able

I've been wanting a bright front door ever since we got into the whole buying-a-house thing. I coveted the bright doors around the neighborhood and online, and talked about it enough to spurn a colorful door gift for our anniversary. Kind of like the gallery wall the ratio of talking about it to actually doing it was absurd. Brad gets to hear all my hair-brained plans over and over and over again. Good man.

The hardest part was picking a color.

The process started in early February, when we made a few stops by Home Depot and Lowe's to pick up other house-related stuff and ended up picking up paint swatches. Other than 'bright' and 'bold' we pretty much liked every possible color.

I'm a sucker for orange, but in South Carolina it's a hard color to disassociate with Clemson. We liked yellow, but it was hard finding a color we both liked that didn't remind Brad of baby poop. We ending up grabbing a whole bunch of reds, greens, teals, and blues and headed home.

Stage 1 was simply covering our fridge in swatches. Seeing the colors side by side and day after day really helped us decide what colors were keepers. Every day or two one of us would veto a color and take it down, until we were left with a reasonable amount to tape on the front door.

Stage 2 was looking at the colors on the door during different times of the day. Even though we liked a single color on a swatch the best, we decided to put the whole range up there just to get an idea of what a wee light or a wee darker would look like, and it helped! Some of the colors we thought were front-runners ended up being too dark or even too bright one we imagined the entire door with it.

Brad's Buckeye roots shouted scarlet, and I was loving the middle teal, but we both loved the green and ended up grabbing that swatch and going to grab paint. the green on the left was the one we liked the best (Exquisite Emerald), but after the door test, we thought it was too dark. However, we weren't entirely sold on the one of the right either (Shamrock Green).

Stage 3 ended up being buying a paint color we hadn't vetted. Oh well. We ended up going with Sherwin Williams's Kilkenny Green, which seemed to be a good in-between option. It was a beautiful weekend and we'd waited long enough so we went ahead and bought a can rather than go through the the whole swatch rig-a-ma-roo again.

Then we prepped. We decided to keep the door on the hinges mostly because it was easier, and decided to leave the frame around the window white, reasoning that we could always paint it green later, but it would be harder to take the green off.

Stage 4: Tape, newspaper, mimosa, cute helpers, repeat.

Stage 5: PAINT! Minor heart attack and major doubt with the first coat. It was streaky. It was green. It was bright.

Thankfully, coats 2 and 3 made a major dent in the streaks, and I was in love. We pealed off the paint, and posed for action shots.

Exhibit A: Brad opening the door. 

Then we dressed that baby up! Brad put the hardware back on and after a day of drying, we got to see it against our white house.  My next quick obsession was getting a wreath, and I found a few selection on Etsy, which I got through twigs4u. I loved her selection of natural wreaths and great prices.

So without further ado...

TA-DA! What do you think??