Curb Appeal – Exterior Paint

With the yard work out of the way until the Spring, one thing we knew we wanted to do before the cold weather set in, was paint the exterior doors of our house.

We wanted the garage doors as well as the front door and panels matte black. After looking at a few exterior paint brands and a helpful suggestion from our neighbors we decided to use Behr Exterior paint. There are 3 levels of Behr exterior paint, based on fade resistance and weathering. Since we live in New England, we chose the top tier level –Marquee.

After we got the paint we purchased all of our supplies – brushes, rollers, paint trays, tape and ladders. I set out taping the windows on our front door as well as the knobs on both the front door and our interior garage door while my husband, Cruz, taped the garage doors and removed the hardware. For the windows I measured their dimensions and pre-cut all my tape strips to make it easier to have one single piece to pull up later.

The kids were excited about painting, so they helped with the first coat on the garage doors and window panels.

Cruz did all the roller work and then I went in after with various sized brushes for all the details and finishes.

Once we had the garage painted, I still felt like something was missing, I told Cruz we needed to paint the back panels of the light fixtures to mimic the square shape that is so dominant on the front of the house. The circle lights and their circle mounts didn’t look good.

After the garage doors were painted we decided to keep a small hint of white on the window trim as an accent. Even though the kids worked hard on painting the garage window panels, we ended up not using them, we felt the design looked cleaner without them.

The last thing we needed for the garage were nickel handles, to mimic our front door , but we had no luck in finding handles to purchase. Instead, I bought metallic Nickel spray paint and I sprayed our existing black handles.

Our interior garage door was also painted black. As I was working on the finishes, I think the hardest part was painting the interior door strip and hinges black and not letting any paint bleed onto the front of the door, which we kept white.

We absolutely love how it turned out! It was the attention to small details that makes me smile when I pull into our driveway. It’s exactly the way we wanted our house to look.