My front yard needed a change! It needed some serious Spring Cleaning… and love.  Since I painted my house 5ish years ago, I have been wanting to also paint the garage doors. The task seemed daunting, but also not a big enough project to warrant paying someone else to do it.  I put it off. Then a few weeks ago I was strolling around a nursery looking for plants and thought about how badly I have wanted to trellis flowers above my garage doors… another job I didn’t totally feel up for… but it got the wheels A SPINNING!

Here’s a picture of the before…. not very exciting.

My sister in law showed me a simple pole trellis she was going to do at her house and I fell in love (post about this coming soon). I was inspired and ready! I decided it was time!! Time to clean up the front of the house and knock out some projects I had been brainstorming. First step would be to paint the garage doors. Give a mouse a cookie though… I pressure washed the front porch, decided I would also pressure wash the driveway, paint the front door, buy new plants, buy new pots (mine where clearly falling apart), then I’d need a trellis, and IF the garage doors where a different color I would definitely need to paint the lights black. GUYS! This is a slippery slope. Ha!

I used Simple Green to help me clean up the garage doors. The weather stripping was pretty dirty.

After everything was dry I taped off the doors with blue painters tape and started to prime the doors. Since my doors are metal, using a good primer was important. I used Extreme Bond Primer by Sherwin Williams.  To apply it I used a brush and a roller. I did a light coat of the primer and let is dry.

I could have used a sprayer, but I really like to paint with a brush.  You could definitely use a sprayer for this project and it would go much faster. There is one part you would still need to brush on however, we will get to that in a minute.

For the paint I used an acrylic latex for exteriors by Sherwin Williams. This is their least expensive exterior paint, it is great paint! Especially paired with the primer. The color I picked was Mindful Grey.

I started to brush on the color in the grooves/indents of the door first.

I used a roller to get everywhere else. Then, for the part you would need to brush on whether you hand paint or spray! You will need to get the sides under the weather striping and in the breaks of the doors. I did this buy lifting up the door a little at a time and brushing in the crack.

I think they turned out pretty great!!!

HERE IS THE BEFORE…..

 

HERE IS THE AFTER….

Next up is the trellis and painting the front door! Stay tuned for all that next week.