Replacing the Front Door

April 9, 2012 By Liz - It's Great To Be Home 14 Comments

Remember when I gave you a sneak peek a few weeks ago of a fun update that we were finally making to the front of our house?

Well it’s time to show you the final result – here’s our new front door!! I’m smitten.

When we first bought our home in the fall of 2008, we were less than thrilled with the peachy-pink paint and frilly iron bars on our front door, and the sheen on the interior of the door was almost as blinding as the gold, shiny flocked wallpaper.

It improved dramatically during the renovations that we did to the house – the peach paint was scraped and sanded off and the door was stained a rich brown, and the inside of the door was painted a crisp white.

The door looked a whole lot better, but it still wasn’t great. We didn’t love the dated, curvy lines of the door, and it wasn’t in very great shape – it let in air through little gaps in the wood and it was really starting to deteriorate.

We like to try to do an update to our home every time that we do a flip – the trades are a little more flexible with their pricing when we already have them booked to do work on the flip. Last time we replaced the windows, another time we made some changes to the lighting, and this time we swapped out the front door!

I’ve really been looking forward to this update – the front door was one of the few “grandma” things that we still had going on in our house, and I couldn’t wait for something new!

Obviously, the first thing the door guys did was remove the old door – it came out in sections, with the door being taken out first and then the sidelites.

Things looked much worse before they started looking better. I was a little concerned that the big notch in the wood floors wouldn’t be covered by the new threshold. Luckily, it was. :)

It was a rough day, supervising the job while I enjoyed the sunshine flooding in and worked from the couch!

The door guys picked up the door that we had selected from Seconds & Surplus – that’s where we’ve gotten the front doors for all of our flips, and we’ve loved all of them. We originally fell in love with another door there but after we waited a few days checking measurements it had been sold (that’s the risk of a surplus store – they’ve only got what they’ve got, and no more). We wound up finding the exact same door there, but it was in a higher grade of wood (solid walnut versus mahogany) and had upgraded glass – it was pricier than our original choice, but we really love it!

The new door is slightly taller and skinnier than our old door, so they had to make some slight modifications to both the door and the opening in the house. We had checked everything out with the door guys before we bought the door, so they were prepared for the changes that needed to be made and they got right to work. From what I gathered, they made the door slightly shorter, added some additional framing and casing around the door, and removed some unnecessary trim above the door opening to make the new door fit like a glove.

I knew I was really going to dig the door as soon as they started installing it.

It sat there, installed yet unstained and very unfinished, until our painting crew started work on the flip – then they took a turn at our house (over the course of 3 days!) to painstakingly stain the door and paint the new, wider casing.

Even the unstained front door looked better than the old one, and we got some compliments from the neighbors.

But once it was stained? True love.

We stuck with our tried and true Dark Walnut stain by Minwax, with polyurethane in a satin finish.

We like that the door has an updated, more streamlined look as compared to our original, frilly door, but that it still looks traditional and fits in on our little ranch-style house.

We also really love the slightly obscured glass, and the fact that all of the glass is up high at the top of the door – the couch that we sit on all the time is in direct view of the front door, so we like having some privacy from the post man and everyone else that comes to the front door.

It doesn’t hurt that we’ve had buckets and buckets of rain lately (perhaps you heard about the tornadoes?), so the lawn and flowers are really popping out and helping our new front door make the house look snazzy.

Have you made any long-awaited changes to your house lately? I can’t tell you how happy I am to finally be able to check “new front door” off the list!!

Guest Blogger: Meredith from Welcome to Heardmont

April 21, 2011 By Liz - It's Great To Be Home 10 Comments

Are you guys ready to get your DIY on? I hope so, ’cause Meredith from Welcome to Heardmont is here today to fill us in on one of the handy skills she’s learned by remodeling her own home.

You’ve been following along with all of her renovations, right? If not, then you’ve got to check out Meredith’s master bathroom to sneak a peek at her most recent project – I think you’ll be impressed!

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Hello It’s Great to Be Home readers! I’m Meredith Heard from Welcome to Heardmont and I’m so happy Liz asked me to be here today. My husband Stephen and I have been remodeling our 1980s rancher, lovingly nicknamed Heardmont, since 2008. We’ve done 99% of the renovations ourselves and three years later, we’ve learned a little about a lot of things, from installing can lights to remodeling bathrooms and beyond.

One room that required a lot of attention when we moved in was our VERY 1980s kitchen. To give you an idea of where we started, here’s how our kitchen looked the day we bought our house.

And here’s how it looks today.

Some of the first projects we tackled in this room were scraping the popcorn ceiling and replacing the fluorescent light with four beautiful can lights. Can you blame us? That ceiling was pretty awful!

Being the novice DIYers that we were, we didn’t realize they made light switch boxes especially for remodeling. So, when we installed our new lighting, we bought a “new construction” box and proceeded to cut a giant hole in our wall in order to hammer the box into the stud.

This is what I’m talking about. Nasty.

We got an outrageous quote from a handyman to patch this hole and decided we’d figure out how to do it ourselves. Here’s how we did it!

Tutorial: How to Patch Drywall

Supplies:
1. Piece of drywall
2. Drywall saw
3. Utility knife with drywall blade
4. Scrap piece of wood or two
5. 3″ drywall screws
6. Glue (We used Elmer’s craft glue)
7. Spackel to blend the patch with your wall
8. Primer and paint to match your wall

Step 1: Using a drywall saw (like the one pictured below, found here) cut the edges of the hole you want to patch so that it is nice and square.

Step 2: If your hole exposes a stud, you can attach your drywall patch directly to that stud. If not, you’ll have to attach a scrap piece of wood to a neighboring stud as a brace.

Since we were working around a switch box on the other side of the wall and having to leave space for a new one, our brace (bottom left) isn’t ideal. If we were strictly patching the hole, we could have put 2 cross braces in between the studs and everything would have been hunky-dory.

Step 3: Cut a new piece of drywall so that it is several inches bigger than your hole on all four sides. For this you will need a utility knife with a blade made especially for your drywall like this one (found here).

Here’s a good method to cut drywall. With your knife, score the drywall along the four sides of your square. Then “snap” it by folding it along those score lines. Flip it over and score the other side of the drywall along your creases. This will create nice clean edges on your patch that is now cut down to size.

Step 4: Score the BACK side of your drywall patch (the part that will be inside the wall) to the size of your hole.

Step 5: Snap the drywall along these four score lines and PEEL the drywall away from the paper backing on the other side. You can see I’ve done this on two sides already in the photo below.

Here is what your patch should look like now.

Step 6: Test out your patch to see if it fits in the hole. If not, shave away at the sides until it fits!

Since we knew we’d be installing a light switch box in this section of the drywall, we went ahead and cut the hole for the box in the patch.

Step 7: Put the patch in the hole. You’ll notice the paper we left along the edges overlaps the “good” drywall on the wall behind it. With your utility knife, score through the paper layer on the edges of your patch AND through the paper on the drywall behind the patch.

This is the very important SECRET step! It is how your patch will blend into your wall without looking lumpy around the edges!

Step 8: Remove the patch and peel away the paper layer you just cut through on your wall.

This is how the edges of your hole should look after peeling away the paper (and paint and bits of whatever else were on your wall!).

Step 9: Test your patch and make any adjustments. Then drill pilot holes through your patch into the brace (or stud) you will attach it to. Once you have your pilot holes, attach the patch to the brace using drywall screws.

Look at how pretty that fit is! See how the paper from the patch fits within the area we peeled from the original drywall?

Step 10: Glue the paper along the edges of the patch to the drywall beneath it. We used Elmer’s glue because that’s what we had. Then spackel over the edges of your patch to hide any seams or screws.

Step 11: After your spackel dries, sand it down for a nice smooth finish.

Step 12: Prime and paint!

Step 13: Enjoy your newly patched drywall and dare your guests to spot the patch!!

I hope you found this tutorial useful and that I made it sound easy enough for you to try it yourself. We actually saved ourselves over $150 doing this patchwork ourselves, and I don’t think a pro could have done a better job!

A huge thanks to Liz for welcoming me to It’s Great to Be Home today. If you want to see the other projects we’ve done in our kitchen click here, or go here to see a full tour of our home at Welcome to Heardmont. Thanks again Liz!

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Meredith, what a fab tutorial! Thanks so much for playing with us today. :) Are you guys ready to tackle drywall now?

The Flip: New Front Door

November 24, 2010 By Liz - It's Great To Be Home 6 Comments

While this house started out with significantly more curb appeal than our last flip, it still needed a little help.

We began by taking out the big, dead tree, and always planned on sprucing up the landscaping. But time went by and we realized that after all of the spiffing we were doing on the inside of the house, the outside just wasn’t going to measure up without some drastic measures.

So we decided to replace the dated shutters and French country front door (that is eerily similar to our own front door).

But, the price had to be right for the new front door – those suckers can be expensive, especially with sidelights!

We hit up one of our favorite haunts for affordable home renovation goodies and found tons of gorgeous doors – but they were all out of our budget. Feeling dejected, we wandered down one last row and found it – a beauty with sidelights that was . . . wait for it . . . on closeout!!

The sidelights even had beveled glass – be still my heart.

We weren’t sure if it would fit in the current front door opening so we asked our trim carpenter to scope it out – after a quick check he gave it the go ahead, but said the door would need some modifications to fit in the opening. Even after that added cost, it turned out that the door was still a fabulous deal so we bought it.