Just when you thought you'd heard the last of the back porch - mwahhhahahaa! Seems like I'm always remembering "one last thing." This weekend was the back door. Here's the before:
From that angle and distance, I guess it doesn't look all that bad with the exception of the bare spot from my experimental heat-gun test last fall. But up close the whole door looked like this:
So there wasn't much choice but to strip this thing down to the bare wood. After all, as you've read ad nausem - that's what the rest of the back porch went through.
So out came the handy dandy Wagner heat gun. As you can see, I had a "plan". Actually the next picture shows either my obsession-compulsion, or some level of ADD. I did all the rails first, then the stiles.
Then I came to the area with the windows. Now, I knew that I couldn't aim the heat gun right at the glass because it would crack. Well, I have now learned that you really shouldn't aim the heat gun anywhere near the glass - one of them cracked (this will lead to another post probably later in the week). So- no heat. Out came the paint stripper, and after two applications - it's on its way!
At the end of the day, a day that started with dreams of a finished door, I have a back door well on its way to being re-finished.
If you've followed this blog at all, you realize that the back porch is all brown and white. We really wanted to add some color, but we're not really adventurous when it comes to color. I went through the "oops" paints in my workshop and considered each - greens, reds, blue, pink, none of them seemed to fit with 1 - the porch, and 2 - our personalities. Then I remembered this little tool box/planter I made this past winter:
I LOVE this shade of yellow. It's hard to really see on a computer screen, and I put a stain "patina" on the toolbox, but it really is a nice, creamy, muted yellow. So we tried to consider the whole door. Did we want it monochrome or some combination.
Before you laugh too hard - I have Photoshop, but it's an oooold version, and I'm not really great with it. So out came the crayons to get some estimation of what we'd like to see. I didn't have a crayon in the exact color, but with a little imagination we could see that "E" was going to be the layout we'd like:
There you have it...the stripping and planning of the back door. Hopefully soon you will be honored (c'mon, you gotta know I say that tongue-in-cheek!) with posts on how to repair a window in a wood door, and the (final?) reveal of the back porch door!