New Door!

You know you're old when you get really excited about a new front door.  But this door has been a work in a progress for a really long time.  We had been searching and researching for weeks, finally made a decision, then all of a sudden the price skyrocketed because it had to be a custom size, so then it was back to the drawing board.

(Ready for door photo overload?)

You might remember that this is what our current door looks like.

And this was initially the door that we really wanted.

But our fiscally conservative nature told us otherwise.  You can buy my love.  Or rather, you can make me not love you by costing me money.

We decided to skip the wood grain and go with a flat door that we would need to paint ourselves.  It saved us a couple hundred dollars and DH felt like it would be easy enough to paint.  We also got price quotes for three different vendors and different glass styles, which actually affects the cost way more than I ever knew.  I liked the "center arch" look that we chose above, but when we realized that it was a more expensive design, I was immediately over it.  We also went to a few places other than Home Depot, but they didn't even attempt to pretend that they could be competitive with Home Depots prices. So much for supporting the little guy.

There was one door in particular that was clearly less expensive than the other two that we were now considering, and we couldn't figure out why.  Was it not as good?  Or it is just that this particular company is more affordable?  We almost went with one of the more expensive options simply because it "must be better, right?", but on the way to Home Depot that day I declared, "Let's get this one," pointing to the less expensive of the three, and DH seemed to be relieved that someone had finally made a choice and he fully agreed.

I now present to you, our new door. 

  

Definitely not as fancy as the wood grain door - which I still admit to loving - but for $1000, I can live with the looks of this one.  After all, it doesn't look bad, it just isn't the original one that I picked out.

We also replaced the horrible old screen door with one that has a retractable screen in the upper half.  This means that we can still get a ton of light in the summer, let in the breeze, not have to worry about Murphy possible scratching through a lower screen AND we don't have to store or change the glass and screen panels every single time a season changes. 

This door also lets in a TON more light than our old door.  The old door was solid in the middle and the sidelights were just clear glass, so the people before us had these nasty, dusty curtains on them, which we just left because we didn't have anything better.   

Old door from the inside: 

And new door from the inside:

In fact, it lets in so much light now that we get this crazy pattern of light in the morning when the sun is shining (not that there's been much of that lately.) 

It still needs to be painted (any ideas for paint colors? Should we do an actual color? Or just paint it white? I can't decide!) and we think that we need to caulk underneath the baseboard since there is a lot of air coming in from there, but both are things that DH can easily do himself.   

We're thrilled to finally be able to check this one off of the to-do list.  Done and done.