Light and Bright

The door leading down to our basement and the door right next to it leads out to the garage.  I cannot even begin to count how many times people have opened the basement door all like, "okay I'm leaving, see you later", until they realize they would be going down to our basement.

I'm guilty of doing that a couple times myself. The entire time the hubs and I were sprucing up our basement and stairway leading down to our basement I knew that I wanted a different door for that reason and I feel like it would open up our kitchen area.  We did the same thing with our old house and loved how it turned out, so we figured why not?

 When we were thinking of a paint color I knew just what I wanted.  I wanted to bring a little bit of the basement up to the kitchen so we decided to use the same color that we painted the basement ceiling.  After some hesitation from the hubs, I took care of it like I do most of our painting projects....while he was at work and it turned out great!

We bought a pre-primed, pre-hung door (this one, but primed) from Menards and brought it back home to get it painted and installed.    It was relatively easy to put up, the hubs managed to get it done by himself without any causalities.  We would totally recommend going with a pre-hung door, especially if you plan on switching out the trim or repainting only because then your almost guaranteed for a perfect fit.  That was our mistake with our previous house was not purchasing a pre-hung, and we noticed that as the house expanded the door would not stay closed.

**FYI we had to special order this door and it took about 10-14 days to have it delivered to the store**

This is what the door looks like before I got my hands on it...The panes of glass have plastic on them and the entire door is primed, which made it easy for this project to be done without a lot of hassle and cutting in!

I got the door finished, two coats on each side, and once it was installed the hubs installed the door knob.  We just got a standard brushed nickel knob.  We are slowly but surely changing all of them out too!

From there we were ready to rock and take off the paint coated plastic.  We recommend using a sharp knife or blade and to go around the edges of each pain.  That will prevent the paint on the plastic from chipping EVERYWHERE and the sheets come off almost in one piece.

Needless to say we love how it turned out and it opens up the kitchen way more than we thought!  Now all we have to do is replace the other doors and paint 1,000 miles worth of trim...