Bright Red Front Door Makeover

I am so grateful to my generous sponsors for this project. Emtek, Kichler Lighting and DecoArt who provided us with products used in this makeover.

Over the course of this summer, Chris and I have slowly been upgrading various parts of our front door.

It actually all started with my mum asking if we could paint the concrete porch. I’ll be honest, I was against it – partially because I don’t think our concrete looks that bad, but mostly because I didn’t want to have to keep painting it every few years as the paint wears/peels off like our deck railings, but that’s a story for another day.

We ended up compromising on the idea of a nice outdoor rug which would (hopefully) distract people from seeing the stained, hard-to-keep-clean concrete.

Shortly after the painted porch/outdoor rug negotiation, Chris mentioned that it would be nice to have better lighting above the garage doors. Oh yeah, and I thought it would be nice to give the front door paint a bit of a touch up…well, then, maybe it would be a good time to replace the front door handles that are literally peeling.

And, as things usually do in our house, one conversation about buying a rug turned into a two-month, full front door makeover.

It’s not that our front door looked bad, but when you looked closely, things were not holding up well. The paint we used when we painted the front door five years ago was not holding up well and the entry set our builder had installed had lost most of its shiny brass finish.

We started updating little pieces here and there and after a busy summer of work, school, family birthdays and travelling we are finally done!

And man do we love it.

We started by replacing the small builder lights with ones that are larger and more stylish. Next to the front door we installed a 2-light lantern style fixture, the Manningham Wall Light from Kichler in Olde Bronze.

It provides way more light and I think the larger fixture looks much better next to our double door entry. I do wish that our builder had installed the electrical box a little lower, but hey – sometimes you have to work with what you’ve got!

Above both our garage doors we installed barn-style fixtures, the Allenbury 14″ Wall Light, also from Kichler. These throw a really nice circle of light downwards which is excellent if we happen to be working in the driveway on projects in the evening.

Instead of simply touching up our front door paint I opted to repaint them completely. Instead of using the same paint that we used before I use some DecoArt Curb Appeal front door paint that I had been given at a Haven Conference a few years ago.

I have to say, I really love this paint. Not only does the new shade of red really pop, but it was such a nice paint to work with. A little really goes a long way and there are hardly any noticeable brush marks. We’re only a month in, so I can’t really say how durable it is, but it seems to have dried to a nice hard finish so I have high hopes.

Our new entry set from Emtek is the icing on the front door cake. The installation was definitely not as easy as I thought it would be – because of our door, not the lockset. I’m going to share more details on that experience in another post, but essentially after some blood (mine), sweat (Chris’) and tears (definitely mine) our front door has a beautiful new entry set.

To finish off the front porch we rearranged our existing furniture and added some hanging planters. Sadly it was a little too late in the season to find plants for these, but next year they will be home to real plants not these plastic ones ?

And, of course, we did end up getting that outdoor rug! I picked up this cute polypropylene pineapple rug during an end-of-season sale. The 3’x5′ size fits in front of our double door perfectly and I love how it looks layered under the extra long door mat.