New Entry Door

Confession time - I'm a freak about lighting. An honest to God highly opinionated, overly critical freak about it. On one hand I love lighting and believe in the power of a great light fixture in a space, but most of the time I don't actually want to see that light turned on. Especially for a photo. I hate when the only light source in a room is from a fixture. The shadows, the light bombs, the coloring, oyyyy it makes my blood boil and my eyes hurt all at the same time. Now, I'm aware that task lighting is necessary, but to me, the happiest spaces are those that are primarily lit with natural light.

Well, guess what - the hub of our current project - the hallways right off the garage was a great example of a bad lighting situation. I've known it since the day we moved in. It has cans, it has a pretty little pendant, but it has only second hand natural light (powder room window and laundry room window) which makes it dark and shadowy. Annoyingly, it's not just the hallway, the breakfast room and stair landing are in the same boat. The latter two sit in the center of the house, and the garage is on the other side of the hallway so there has never been much hope for integrating a window BUT a few weeks ago a sliver of hope occurred to me.

Enter the existing door. 

This is the entry door from the open air garage which means just on the other side of this solid beast is sunlight. Glorious, glorious sunlight. This door needed glass. It would change everything, I just knew it. 

As I mentioned the idea to Brent I honestly had no idea how involved this change would be. Turns out, the whole thing was relatively simple.  The first step was to pick out the door so we perused the Internet to find that Home Depot actually had a pretty wide selection and their prices were pretty good at just over $200. As much as I was desperate for the natural light, I knew we didn't want a full lite door. Not the right look, plus we didn't like the idea of being that exposed from a privacy standpoint. We ended up selecting this 9-lite door and within the hour, the old door was off and the new door was on. 

Boom:

Just look at that light.

As excited as we were with the instant happy this little change had already made, this door switch-a-roo was not without some hiccups. The first, the door hardware. Brent measured the hinge location of the old door as compared to the new door before mounting and while that was all good, the latches in the door way were way off. Nothing is ever simple, sigh. Brent used his drimel to cut out new latch locations to match the new door and we used wood filler to cover the old holes, creating a seamless look. Next, it was time to paint the door. Initially we thought about painting the door white to match the shiplap walls (all just primed as of now) but then we decided NAY, let's do something fun. So, we settled on this dusty blue/gray color called Flint Smoke from Behr.

It took a few coats but I could tell we had a winner after just a few strokes. 

It's like the door was meant to be this color. So happy and so warm at the same time. And the natural light from the glass is a game changer y'all, not just for this mudroom area but for the breakfast room and stair landing as well.

We are so happy with the results, but I will say the one negative to the pretty new door is the fact that it just magnifies the ugly creamy trim color. We are still weighing options as to how to attack this. Do we paint the entire downstairs with a fresh clean white? Or do we go back with the creamier color to keep costs down and keep things consistent throughout the house. Perhaps with the new natural light flooding in the old paint color won't seem so yellow. What do you think?

All photos are my own.