If you own a mid century modern house and your house had been 'modernized' with a spiffy (and I don't mean this in a good way) modern door, you've probably been looking for either an old door that someone else was changing out, or a new door to bring your front entry way back to how it should look. We'd been scouring Craigslist for an old door for awhile with no luck. Various websites list different options for period-look mid century entry doors, including
this article on Retrorenovation.com. The cheapest mid-century looking door on that page starts around $500 bucks and is fiberglass from home dumpster. We'd been thinking about that door as our current door leaves much to be desired from a modern perspective.
LOTS of photos below!
Well, I was walking around in Menards for something else entirely - I was looking for either some sandpaper or wood for something else entirely, and I walk through the doors section on my way down the back aisle toward where I was going and I saw this... And then I saw the price tag... (squint and look at the picture to the right)... And then I saw that it was on sale on top of it. So we talked about it for awhile (about 30 seconds), and decided to order the 36" slab door and use our existing jamb and hardware for now. Took about a week, and the total cost delivered was less than 200 bucks. The door is available, as far as I can tell, only from Menards - and if you order from them and have a local store, they will ship it there for free. It's called a Mastercraft 5 lite offset steel top-lite exterior door. You can find info on it from Menard's
here. It arrives nicely primed and in a pretty robust protective cardboard box with lots of styro padding. Now, it does have the typical plastic moldings around the windows, but the windows are double insulated, and the door is really solid and heavy. It comes with a wood edge on the hinge side so that you can mortise the hinges for the spacing on your particular jamb. We also got the pre-bored door for both the lockset and the deadbolt, and we checked the spacing of our old jamb and door before ordering to make sure the spacings would be the same. Mounting the door took about 30 minutes, but it made the front of the house look 60 years older. And that's a really good thing!
After mounting the door, I took it back down so it could receive paint. We had bought a cordless sprayer for just this sort of project, and we decided on a pretty bright green color. The color is called Dark Lime from Benjamin Moore, number 2027-10. I had originally wanted orange, but we have a lot of bright orange stuff as is, and last year when we went to Palm Springs for Christmas, we had seen a lot of cool houses in the white-and-bright-green color palette that looked really good to us in the Racquet Club area. If you have never been to Palm Springs and are interested in modernism, check out my blog entry called
Picking Through the Morgue: Racquet Club Drive, Palm Springs - One of the Ultimate Mid Century Style Guides. There is a lot of variation in the vintage mid century places in Palm Springs, both in terms of color, and in terms of materials used to accent the color choices. The house that we both said 'whoa' to was this one here. This house doesn't have the lime front door, but uses a similar color as an accent on the ceiling of the carport and the beam that runs across the front of the house. Totally groovy look. The color scheme would look pretty similar on our house in North Dakota as we have a stark white vinyl exterior, and almost all of the window and door trim is white. AND, this color scheme would certainly look awesome with our newly completed front breeze block entryway - oh yeah, I still need to finish that blog entry, don't I?
In any case, her is the door installed but before we painted it green. It really does finish the front entryway off very nicely. You can see that there is a storm/screen door that is propped open in the photo. That will be removed next year for a roll-up screen that completely retracts so that the clean look of the new door will be unimpeded by the ugly storm door. All tolled, we ended up having to spray four light coats of the Dark Lime on the door. It's a pretty light base color, and it ended up taking the entire quart of paint. We did the outside only and left the nice very pale gray primer on the inside. It actually matches the wall color that we have almost perfectly and is somewhere between a semi-gloss and an eggshell. The Dark Lime is only on the outside, and it has really made a dramatic difference to the look of the front of the house. Unfortunately, I was in such a rush to get the ugly POS door that was on the house off of there, that I didn't take a before and after photo for side by side comparison, but I did include a photo of the original door as it currently sits in our garage awaiting a new home via Craigslist. Huge improvement not only in terms of looks, but the additional windows add much-needed light to the inside entryway that was pretty dark and dismal before. So, if you've been looking for an mid-century correct option for your front door, swing by your local Menards if you're in the midwest, or think about ordering online if you're not! Great looking door, for pretty cheap, and pretty high quality as well! Additional photos below.
After mounting the door, I took it back down so it could receive paint. We had bought a cordless sprayer for just this sort of project, and we decided on a pretty bright green color. The color is called Dark Lime from Benjamin Moore, number 2027-10. I had originally wanted orange, but we have a lot of bright orange stuff as is, and last year when we went to Palm Springs for Christmas, we had seen a lot of cool houses in the white-and-bright-green color palette that looked really good to us in the Racquet Club area. If you have never been to Palm Springs and are interested in modernism, check out my blog entry called Picking Through the Morgue: Racquet Club Drive, Palm Springs - One of the Ultimate Mid Century Style Guides. There is a lot of variation in the vintage mid century places in Palm Springs, both in terms of color, and in terms of materials used to accent the color choices. The house that we both said 'whoa' to was this one here. This house doesn't have the lime front door, but uses a similar color as an accent on the ceiling of the carport and the beam that runs across the front of the house. Totally groovy look. The color scheme would look pretty similar on our house in North Dakota as we have a stark white vinyl exterior, and almost all of the window and door trim is white. AND, this color scheme would certainly look awesome with our newly completed front breeze block entryway - oh yeah, I still need to finish that blog entry, don't I?
In any case, her is the door installed but before we painted it green. It really does finish the front entryway off very nicely. You can see that there is a storm/screen door that is propped open in the photo. That will be removed next year for a roll-up screen that completely retracts so that the clean look of the new door will be unimpeded by the ugly storm door. All tolled, we ended up having to spray four light coats of the Dark Lime on the door. It's a pretty light base color, and it ended up taking the entire quart of paint. We did the outside only and left the nice very pale gray primer on the inside. It actually matches the wall color that we have almost perfectly and is somewhere between a semi-gloss and an eggshell. The Dark Lime is only on the outside, and it has really made a dramatic difference to the look of the front of the house. Unfortunately, I was in such a rush to get the ugly POS door that was on the house off of there, that I didn't take a before and after photo for side by side comparison, but I did include a photo of the original door as it currently sits in our garage awaiting a new home via Craigslist. Huge improvement not only in terms of looks, but the additional windows add much-needed light to the inside entryway that was pretty dark and dismal before. So, if you've been looking for an mid-century correct option for your front door, swing by your local Menards if you're in the midwest, or think about ordering online if you're not! Great looking door, for pretty cheap, and pretty high quality as well! Additional photos below.
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