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Our DIY Storm Door
We live near a wonderful Habitat for Humanity thrift store. They sell all the usual thrift store stuff, but they also have a home improvement section, with appliances, windows, doors, lights, plumbing fixtures, etc. In January, they had a bunch of storm doors, still in their original packaging. I’m not sure if they were overstock or had just been donated to Habitat, but they were sweet doors and Habitat was selling them for $100 each. They only came in one color - “cranberry” which is like a deep reddish maroon color. Our front door was bright red, but a bit faded, so I started thinking maybe we could paint it to match.  We decided to go ahead and get the storm door, and when we went back, they were on sale for $50!! Whoo hoo! So we brought home the door and took a piece of it to Home Depot to get matching paint.Â
After that, we had about five weeks of bad weather, then we were out of town for the next three weekends. This past weekend, we had set aside for home improvement projects, and the weather was beautiful. I painted our front door on Saturday, and then we spent half of Sunday following the very convoluted directions that came with the storm door. It took us forever, but we now have a beautiful storm door (it’s very fancy - it even has it’s own deadbolt!) and a matching front door. And since we did all the work ourselves, it only cost us $50 for the door and about $30 for the paint. We have lots of leftover paint, so maybe we’ll find something else that needs to be painted that shade!
Not only does the entryway look much better, I’m also excited about the energy saving aspect of the storm door. I bet it will pay for itself within a couple years.Â
Now to find the motivation to finish painting the downstairs…
update:Â here are the pictures…
Hi. I’d love to see a picture of your handiwork. yay for the nice price.
April 3rd, 2007 at 7:20 am
[...] When we installed our new storm door recently, we threw away a few strips of plastic that were left over after we had everything in place. It looked like they were meant to go on another door (the instructions were for several different doors), and we pitched them with the packaging. Bummer. The door had a solid glass front, with a full-size screen inside of it. The design is a bit awkward, but the idea is that you can have glass and screen, or just glass, or just screen. We had the glass and screen setup in place, since that’s how the door came out of the box. But we decided to go with just the glass, as it would look better, and the chances were slim of us ever going to the trouble of taking out the screen, taking out the glass, and then putting the screen back in order to have just screen. [...]
April 19th, 2007 at 12:19 am