Carriage House Garage Doors Guest Post for Remodelaholic

For those of you that didn't see my guest post for Cassity at Remodelaholic, Here it is.

It's a pleasure to introduce myself. My name is Terry and I live in western Illinois. I am married and have two grown children and we are recent empty nesters. I am also fairly new to blogging since November, 2010 with my blog foreverdecorating.blogspot.com.
It has been a learning curve and I have begun to train myself to think about my projects with blogging  in mind; ie: before pictures and tutorials.

I was raised with parents that made everything they possibly could and forced to sew all my clothes at the age of eight (now I am thankful). So it comes natural to me that, I could and would, tear into any home renovation or make anything I could (or maybe it's because I am cheap). It's a hobby, a lifestyle and a joy for me to do these things. I believe that if you want it bad enough you will figure out a way to have it. I am blessed with a God given creative gene that I am very thankful for.

I recently posted on my painted carriage house garage doors, but with this guest post, I would like to give more of a tutorial of how I did this and why.

These finished garage doors came about one day when my hubby announced that he wanted to replace our existing garage doors with carriage house style garage doors. First, I must stress that nothing was wrong with our insulated garage doors.

Granted they were bright white when the sun would shine on them, otherwise, no problems. We also have three huge windows in the front of the garage with the garage doors being side entry.

It had been raining the day I took this picture so the brick is off color

So we get plenty of light in our garage...no need for real windows in the garage doors. So I decided to surprise my hubby with the doors of his dreams on the cheap...just for the cost of the paint. I painted the white garage doors the color of the body of our upper story. It's called Ramie by Sherwin Williams. That solved the problem of the glaring white doors. Then I had to make two stencils, one for the hinge and one for the handles.

Easy to do. I had clear stencil sheets, so I just drew and cut out my stencils. Then I used black acrylic paint in those small plastic bottles to paint these on the doors. I mixed some white acrylic paint with the black to make the gray for shadowing and painting the details of the screws.

Here is what the doors looked like when my hubby came home from work. 

He saw the doors and really like them and then said, "But I wanted windows!" with a kind of whining sound (Don't tell him I said that)!!! Okay, back to work. Using blue painters tape, I simply taped off four squares in each raised panel and painted the windows with black paint. When the tape was removed, it appeared that these windows had mullions to match the ones in our real windows. I then made the gray paint again and painted shadows.

With hubby happy, all I had to do was seal the acrylic paint with water based exterior sealer. It has been two years since I did this process and the doors look the same today as the day I painted them, so this sealer for exterior works great. It can be purchased at any hardware or paint store.

Total cost for this project was just the cost of paint and sealer...around $25. I'd say that's about a penny on the dollar of what real carriage garage doors would cost and hubby is happy!