Today we painted our soon to be new back door. Its taken us ages to restore this door so it was nice to finally paint it. We found the door up in the rafters of our decrepit garage with a good layer of soil and plant life on top. We had to replace all the trim, panels and most of the stiles needed major repairs from abuse by crowbars.
So we painted a door today, but there’s a lot more to it than that, what we are doing is putting a stake in the ground for the colour scheme for the whole house which we’ll hopefully live with for many years.
When we bought the house it had been gutted and very little of the original trim or details remained however there were some remaining surfaces that retained the original paint such as the light blue sea green color of the stairs and balusters.
We decided to continue with this colour which started us on our headache to match it. We started off with countless colour cards followed by various samples which were way off the mark. Finally we found a colour card which seemed a great match so off we trotted to get a gallon of Sherman Williams Duration which was recommended by Derrick.
First coat went on and it looked too green. We let it dry overnight hoping it would mellow but in the morning light it was still firmly too green. After a bit of head scratching we thought we could take our paint back to Sherwin Williams in the hope that they could magically re-tint it to what we wanted and in truth it was an act of purest optimism and would have undoubtedly ruined a gallon of pretty expensive paint in the process. As luck would have it Sherman Williams closes at 4:30 on Saturday and we missed it by minutes. We then thought of buying some sample latex paint from a box store and blending it ourselves, but before we did this we thought we’d run the idea past Derrick as we’d be blending different makes. So glad we spoke to Derrick as he very helpfully suggested we go to an art store and buy acrylic paint (small tubes/bottles etc.).
The nearest store was Michaels so we got some Black and Manganese Blue acrylic from Golden which is great quality paint but it does cost a little more, that said it was worth it for the beautiful swirls it gave while mixing. Back home we started making colour swatches by adding a single drop of acrylic each time. I was a bit concerned that I may add too much acrylic to our paint and ruin it, how wrong was I!! In total we added 6oz of Golden Manganese Blue, 8 drops of Golden Black, 8oz of Liquitex Cerulean Blue and 8oz of Liquitex Titanium White (we went with the Liquitex due to cost).
The results of this did improve the color and now the door is more bluish than greenish however, the blue is a little dark so we’ll probably add another 8oz of White Titanium. We think we’ll leave the side of the door we painted as it is as it’s already had three coats, but the other side is fresh wood.
If you could have waited 2-3 years while I perfected my brush strokes I could have done that for you!
We have plenty more to paint and thanks for your offer of help. We’ll be taking you up on it 🙂
How I wish I could use a gloss roller. Tell me is that the door you forgot about the glass panels? Difficult to tell on my phone but it looks a pretty good match to me especially if you think about weathering and wear and tear of the original.
Good to hear from you Chris and hope all is well. No this isn’t the door that I forgot about the windows, that one is still work in progress. Yes the color is close, but its a little too bright for us and for the sake of $10 more acrylic we reckon we can nail it. Once we have got the right colour I believe we can paint a large swatch and take that to the paint store and get them to match it, other wise every gallon of paint will cost about $120 due the cost of the extra acrylic 😮
Looks like it’s worth the extra effort. Lovely colour. All this paint mixing must be the aspiring artist in you Davey ! atb rich. ::-)
Cheers Rich, we think we’ll do one more color mix for the other side and then I think we’ll be fed up of trail and error and stick with what we have!!!!