The exterior of our house is sort of drab with its beige siding and black shutters and front door. To give it a pop of color, I decided I wanted a green front door.

front door before

First, I had to pick the color. Ergh. After staring at different shades for too long, I chose Ivy Pasture by Valspar.

green swatches

I got a quart of the color in the semi-gloss Duramax formula. Valspar Duramax is an exterior paint, so it’s perfect to paint the front door with. To prep the door, I stripped it of its hardware (more on that later) and wiped it down a couple of times with a liquid deglosser.

deglosser door prep

The deglosser strips the existing surface of its glossiness so the new paint adheres better. The Duramax is a primer + painter so I skipped the primer and went straight to painting my green front door.

I used a brush to get into grooves and a high density foam roller to smooth everything on the flat surface. Applying paint in thin, even layers is key, since thick layers will potentially drip and take longer to dry. After the first layer, I was kind of regretting my green front door decision…

Then three layers later (with drying time between), we had a wonderfully green front door!

green front door valspar green ivy

I left the door open for a few hours to let the paint dry then installed some spruced up hardware. Pretty easy. Duramax is low-VOC and latex-based, so it’s minimally smelly and brush clean up is effortless.

This is a less-than-awesome photo of our new green front door. I need to take one zoomed out so you can compare the before and after properly!

valspar green ivy

Any door painting in your house? Lots of black interior doors have been popping up on my Pinterest lately. Interesting. As you can see, we switched up the door hardware. I’ll give you the play-by-play on that one later this week.

UPDATE! We painted the inside of our front door!! We looove it. And here’s how we did the hardware.

4 Responses to Mean, Lean, Green Front Door

  1. Andrea says:

    Love, Love, Love this color! I’ve been trying to find the exact shade of green that is stuck in my mind and you found it and painted your front door with it! Thank you for listing the color because I’m headed to Lowe’s tomorrow. The green samples I bought today were too lime.

    • paige says:

      Thank you! I’m so glad it helped. We still really like it. Even the kid down the street told us he liked it 🙂 Post a picture when you finish!!

      • Andrea says:

        HAHA! You know you made the right choice if the neighbor kid approves!! I live in Southwest Missouri, so it won’t be warm enough to paint it except for a little square to test it out for a few more weeks. I’ll definitely post a picture when I’m finished. 🙂

    • paige says:

      Great! Looking forward to it. I should add – we recently touched up a scratch (furniture moving incident) and the Valspar paint blended really well. The patch is completely invisible (a feat that’s rarely achievable with wall paint!)

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