Dated Door Overhaul

I partnered with Zabitat for this project, and I couldn't be happier that I did!

There are many projects in this house that I knew immediately upon entry were going to make a huge difference in the feel of the home, and updating our exterior doors was at the top of that list. I could not WAIT to swap out our old oak door for something more my style, and though we would all love to have unlimited budgets to go and buy allll the doors, it just isn't in the cards all the time. Besides, who would I even be if I didn't give a DIY on our door a shot, right?!

I came across a company called Zabitat that creates glass inserts for existing doors and knew that this would be the perfect fit (literally) for my door project. So I got to work and the wonderful humans over at Zabitat walked me through how to ensure that I selected the perfect insert for our particular door. I went with a glass insert with a grid on it because I wanted to let as much light into the mudroom as possible, and I thought that the grid was just stunning.

Once I had placed my order, Zabitat took care of packing up my little glass baby and sending it my way, and it arrived quicker than I thought, but most importantly- it was alive and well! Now- to get to work!

The first thing we did was remove the existing door and take it on out to the garage where we very carefully removed the existing oval glass insert. We were pretty nervous about this, but having two set of hands was a huge help so that we could remove the glass carefully without it crashing to the ground. Once the glass was removed and safely stored, we hopped on to the Zabitat website to find instructions that walked us through making the new cutout for the new, gorgeous glass. This part was even more nerve wracking than removing the original glass, because if we messed this up, we would have no choice but to buy a new door. After measuring once, twice, and a third time, we used our jigsaw to cut out a rectangle that was the perfect size for the new glass insert.

After a little trial and error, we realized that we really wanted the inside of the grids to be black so that anything you could see through the glass wouldn't contrast with the door, which we planned on painting black. So, we removed those and threw some spray paint on them- easy peasy. What we learned in this process was that we should have primed the front of the grids FIRST and then sprayed the back. I learned the hard way that painting the grids while on the door will ultimately result in white primer seeping on to the black grids, which will THEN result in you having to remove the grids AGAIN so that you can spray paint them AGAIN. You live you learn - that's the name of this DIY game.

Once the drama of Gridgate had subsided, I was ready to finish up this DIY so I primed the door with a stain and tannin blocking primer (shellac based) and then added three coats of an exterior paint to both sides of the door. Keep a paint scraper on hand if you're like me and you don't want to bother with painters tape. I let that baby dry and put our door handle and lock back on and I honestly can not believe this is the same door! It truly looks like a gorgeous, modern new door, and for a fraction of the price and a little elbow grease, I couldn't be happier! Take a look at these Before and Afters- can you even believe that its the same door?!