Let’s talk front door paint. Repainting your front door is one of the quickest ways to bring some serious curb appeal to your house, but you have to do it the right way and you have to use the right kind of exterior paint, or else it looks like garbage after just a few months.
Remember how we’ve talked about finding the right paint for the job and that paint is not a one size fits all type of product? When you are painting outside doors, you MUST use exterior paint. Want to see what happens when you don’t? This is at our family cabin. This door was painted with regular latex just 2 years ago. Can you see how much it’s faded and discolored? That friends, is why you need exterior paint.
How To Paint A Front Door
Prep
Once we had our vintage doors for the Merc modified and hung it was time to get painting. We started by taping EVERYTHING off. Prep is wicked important, especially when you’re using a paint sprayer.
Prime
The first step to painting raw wood is to prime it. Primer keeps the good stuff in and the bad stuff out. It preps the wood for paint and creates the best possible scenario for paint to adhere. It also helps even out the wood texture and is usually significantly cheaper than paint so it’s better to do 2 coats of primer + 2 coats of paint vs. 4-5 coats of paint.
The primer that we used is Sherwin-Williams Exterior Latex Wood Primer.
Painting Your Front Door
The best front door paint Is Sherwin-Williams Emerald Exterior. On our trim we used a color called Tricorn Black (you can see all of my paint colors here!!) There are some tricks to using Emerald Exterior paint. It’s very thick, which is good and also can be frustrating. We had to get a different tip for our sprayer because the paint was too thick for the smaller one. So that is lame. Emerald Exterior paint has a longer cure time than what you’re probably used to, especially if you’re only used to interior latex. This may seem like a negative until you watch the magic happen. When you spray (or roll) paint, especially thick paint, your immediate finish looks like this:
I get it. It’s textured, and freak-out inducing. BUT DON’T TOUCH IT!!! Channel every bit of patience that you have and walk away to let it dry. Just like when you paint furniture! As the paint cures it will flatten out and dry to a smooth finish. If you leave it alone.
Make sure that you are painting on a breeze-free day. Otherwise you’ll end up with loads of treasures in your paint!
When you’re painting exterior doors, you can leave them installed,
A tip for painting if your door has moulding like ours, Don’t try to do it all in one pass, you’ll put too much paint on the surface and still miss parts of the trim. Instead, lower the output of your sprayer and hit each side of the moulding, then do a pass over the whole door.
Remember that texture-y up close picture above? This is what it looks like after it dries.
What a beautiful door. I have not painted the outside of my front door, but successfully painted the inside with a milk paint. My door is metal, and is chipping on the outside. Any suggestions from you or other readers on how to successfully paint the exterior of a metal front door would be appreciated. xoxo
My door was doing the same thing! It was so bad that I could just chip it all off with a drywall knife. So I did! I guess the builder didn’t even prime the metal. I went to home Depot and they said for metal I needed to use a bonding primer. So I did a coat or two of that and then used Benjamin Moore outdoor paint. My door is South facing so it gets a lot of sun and I’ve had no problems with chipping of any kind and it’s been 6 years since I painted it! I haven’t even needed to do touch ups!
And I love your doors Mandi!! ?
Love these suggestions. Our house colors are shades of browns and I really, really, really want to paint my front door a grey! Our stone-ucco has shades of browns and greys which I think means it’s a project if the heat drops here in Denver for a day! laura
If you are using an airless sprayer, you can use a fine finish tip and use low pressure. Its definitely worth the cost of the tip. It creates a beautiful finish. And uses way less material.
Literally just painted the door to my garage. Used SW paint and floetrol with a foam roller and got a super smooth finish. It was hot out too, so the floetrol really helped prevent the paint from getting tacky and gloppy.
Interesting. I’ve painted my front door with latex, and it has never faded. Maybe because I put a top coat on. I painted my kids’ playscape with exterior paint, and it has held up great compared to its front door that I spray painted, though!
I have one of those doors with window panes ie two small squares on top and then rectangles below them. I’m insanely detail oriented and so I did it in sections, taping off and letting it dry, then painting sections that went a different direction. It took a lot of time but it looks so much better than if I’d painted it all in one phell swoop. It’s a dark turquoise and it perked up my beige house tremendously. And now I’m doing the DIY Sharpie diamond wallpaper in my entry way. It’s going to be so lovely when it’s all finished!
What type of sprayer do you use? We recently returned one because it didn’t work very well.
Wish I found your information 3 weeks ago! So I used Tricorn Black SW outdoor resilience gloss 3 weeks ago with a great small foam roller after I sanded and fine sanded the red. The first two coats looked magnificent in terms of smoothness, but my husband thought it needed one more just to cover a couple more areas that didn’t look as evenly dark. I recently moved to the NE where it is much more humid than no humidity Colorado. When the builder painted my avg HD door red last December, it really didn’t even itself out and not look uneven until probably April or May. Long story short, after third coat and letting adequate dry time Btwn coats, it is evenly black, but not smooth and I can see roller marks. The temp has been in the 50’s and 60’s while painting and afterward, under a covered porch.