Front Door Redo Part 1

Well, no baby just yet!!  Boooo!!  All in due time though, right?  I just wish my 'due time' was now!!

This week I'm going to show you our front entrance / door redo.  With our last house, because it was so much smaller, we were able to just tackle one full project at a time, and not worry about having to go back later to make it the way we wanted it.  We did it completely and correctly the very first time.

But this house is bigger.  A lot bigger, so things take time to shop around for, and to complete.  We can't do everything all at once, and until the past few months, Chris wasn't able to help much due to the whole work full time / school full time thing, so I did as much as I could on my own.

Unfortunately, I don't have a great before picture of our original front door.  I redid this prior to my blog days, so taking before and after pictures used to escape my mind quite a bit!  I sort of took a picture as I was redoing it, so can semi see the jest of where we started.

Here's the view from the inside...

Another inside view...In this one, note the pink tile in the entry way.  Pretty huh?!  Blah!

And here's an outside shot.  You can see the pink tile on the step part of the door.  Oh, and you can see that for some reason, the previous owners changed the left door to open instead of the right.  That actually stayed like that for quite some time!

We priced out doors when we first moved in, and the cheapest we could find one in our size was close to $3000.  I decided to just use gel stain to redo the door, and put off the whole buying a new front door extravaganza until a later date.

I also decided that re-tiling the entry way would solve at least 80% of what bothered me.  The pink, slick tiles were not exactly our style.  I started on the tiling job one Sunday morning while Chris was studying for an exam, and told him that I didn't want / need his help because I could do it all on my own.

In our old house, I laid all of the tile for our kitchen and guest bathroom redo, so I've gained quite a bit of experience and felt quite confident in my tile laying abilities.  We actually have a pretty good system going when we're both redoing tile...I lay all of the tile, and Chris makes all of the cuts.

Well...I started at about 8 a.m. and laid as much tile as I could, and at 5 p.m. Chris decided he was done studying for the day because he felt so bad for me, and he came outside to help me finish up...which we did at 9 p.m..  Why I thought this would just be a one-day job solo is beyond me.  Things are always better together, right?!

So after some new tile laying, removing the old hardware, installing new hardware, getting rid of those ugly gold kick plates, and gel-staining the old front door, our entry way looked like this :

This is the only horrible picture I managed to snap of the inside.  Oops!

Which is how it stayed for the past year and a half.  I didn't do the greatest job with applying my gel stain.  It was the first time I'd ever used the stuff, and I put it on entirely too thick, and didn't do a second coat.  Wrong wrong wrong way to apply gel stain!  Live and learn though, right?

The main problem with these doors is the glass though.  One, when you walk into the house, our bedroom goes off to the right, and the kitchen goes off to the left.  I can't tell you how many times we've peaked out from our bedroom hallway to see if anyone was out front and then took off running to get something from the kitchen in our skivvies.  Which, as you can imagine, has become quite the challenge to 'run' with my 9 month pregnant body I'm rocking!  Two, the previous owners actually cracked the glass when they were moving their stuff out, so the front doors are actually a huge safety concern for when Kalia gets old enough to pull herself up and crawl around.

Plus, I like the idea of not having to answer the door if I don't want to.  With the glass doors, you'd literally have to hide if you didn't want to answer the door, which we did occasionally do.  And it's weird when your neighbor comes by to chat with you and tells you that she saw all of the wonderful gifts that you got from your baby shower in your living room.  Yeah, she saw them through our glass.  Slightly creepy.  We do have great neighbors, but still...I don't want everyone to be able to see in my living room when they so please!

So getting new doors was the very last thing on our to-do list before Kalia got here.  We've actually been in the process of doing this for MONTHS, but that post is for another day.  Stay tuned to see what we wound up with!!

Hope everyone had a great weekend!  Happy Monday!!  Only TWO weeks left till my due date--woot woot!!

If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or subscribe to the feed reader to get future posts delivered to your reader.