front door - better to see you with.

this is our house... white picket fence and all

we bought the house with the picket fence, vinyl siding, and fake shutters, all of which is not our cup of tea.  even though this isn't our aesthetic i do think that our house has a nice cottage(ie) feel to it.   that said JD and i are in the clean lines camp... so eventually we plan on updating the envelope of the house.  we have to start somewhere so STEP 1 the front door.

the door we had up until this weekend was painted blue, a bright blue in fact, that i actually liked.  that bright blue door really was the most daring of all the things going on on our facade.  coincidentally the bright blue of the front door is actually the bright blue of our tiny textured wall bathroom which isn't so successful... yeah maybe it wasn't so much of a coincidence hmm.

we had installed a screen door, last summer, on both the front, and back doors to help with some air movement in our house.  although i love the screen door it had to come down.  the new door is a bit smaller that the existing door and we will need to rebuild the screen door to fit, if we decide to reinstall it.  for now the screen door came down.

after we removed the door we found that our house has quite a thick wall section of siding.  as you can see in the picture below we have the original cedar shake siding which had been overlayed by the dreaded asbestos siding, then a thin layer of foam was applied (probably to provide a more even surface) and finally the vinyl.  that should be fun to remove - maybe JD will actually let me hire someone for that!

once the old door was out we wanted to see how the new door would fit in the old opening.  we dry fitted the door and began to work out all the lovely details of remodeling and working with existing conditions.  one issue we needed to address was the existing hardwood threshold that would need to be reuse and refitted to fit the new door assembly.

we started by installing an additional cedar strip to help support the new door at the threshold... then this beauty was sanded down, had the old paint removed, and then was repainted.

here you can see the newly painted threshold now in place in the door opening.

i'll skip all the boring details of door installation for you and show you the finished product.  we fiddled around with the door for a good 1.5 hours hanging it.. if not more.  then JD worked on the hardware installation... then came the exterior trim.  (which in our case is only temporary until we redo the exterior)  isn't it beautiful?  we get tons more light into the house and i just love it.

here is a shot while the clean up was in process.  i was going to wait until everything was perfect but we were running out of daylight.  i must also mention that the puppies have been enjoying their new ablity to view the passerbyers on the street.  i can see now that i will have a continual battle of nose prints on the glass to deal with.  a small price to pay for a new door and lots of natural light.