A Labor of Love ~ The Pantry Door

The antique door was the must-have piece to my pantry make-over.  Finding the perfect door was actually what made the hold up for starting on this project.  I had found doors online that I could order but they would cost me hundreds of dollars and they were not antiques.  Well the light finally shown down on us one night while we were at the Flowery Branch Auction.  As we were walking in, Joe looked to some doors (what looked like junk!) leaning up against the outside of the building and said, “There it is!”  We were so excited.  He got the door from the seller for $20 and I was so tickled!  He took off the old, plain door and made sure that the antique door would fit….how lucky were we that it was a perfect fit!!??!!

Now here comes the not-so-fun part…I had a vision for this pantry door and sometimes Joe doesn’t see the same vision (or maybe he just doesn’t want to put in the extra work to make the vision come true :0).  He wanted to just simply paint the door black or dark brown, hang it, and be finished.

Well….I had my heart set on staining the door to show off the beautiful wood.  I mean what’s the point of an antique door to just paint it?  The problem was that this poor door probably had 3 million coats of paint on it.  It didn’t matter…I was going to find that beautiful wood!

We coated the door in paint stripper, scrubbed, scrapped, got a couple of chemical burns, sanded, and even cried a little. 

In the end I compromised and we only stripped the front of the door, stained it, and painted the back of the door the same color as the inside of the pantry.  Joe even convinced me to paint the inside lip of the windows on the front.  It was just so hard to get all that paint out of those crevices!

You can tell that this part of the project took a few days to complete (longer than any other part of the project!) by seeing that Joe has different clothes on in each picture :0).  Speaking of pictures, I think now is a good time to mention this.  I hope you know that I also do as much work as Joe does, you just always see him in the pictures because he doesn’t stop to take pictures of me. :0)  I am the only one who thinks to grab a few shots!

In the end I am extremely glad that we put the effort in to get that paint off the front of the door!  It is such a beautiful door!  Come back on Thursday and Sunday to see some special touches that we added to our door, and then next Friday is the big reveal of the whole finished project!!