In Which the Front Door Exterior is "Done" (ish)

After finishing the paint job on the interior of the door, I took a break from working on the door. I was pretty sick of staring at the door and needed a break. Well, a month passed and the wife finally decided that the front door couldn't stay partially stripped forever. I still didn't want to work on it, so I have to admit I totally half-assed the prep work. I did a bit of scraping with a contoured carbide, accepting that a little bit of lead dust was unavoidable. Then I sanded as little as possible and applied about 25% as much durham's rock hard as I probably should have.

Not enough putty

I did end up fixing a couple of really, really deep gouges in the door frame where, I assume, someone either tried to break in with a pry bar, or ran a very large piece of furniture into the door frame while moving in.

I hit the putty with sandpaper and put the work on pause while the weather turned wet for a couple of days. I wanted to make sure the putty wan't holding any moisture before I covered the door in oil primer.

Thanks to this latest burst of summery weather, I didn't have to wait too long before I threw on a coat of oil based primer. My goal was to get some primer down to encapsulate the older paint I couldn't scrape off and didn't cover with putty for sanding. If I was lucky, I could sand the primer down to a smooth surface like I did with the interior.

Yeah...

Once the primer dried, I knew my plan hadn't worked (I knew it wouldn't). The exterior primer I was using wasn't as high-build as the easy sand I used on the interior, and I put 3 or 4 coats of that stuff down, with putty in between. I could have stopped and put more putty down and reprimed and done the job correctly. But I didn't. I was done with the door, I didn't want to spend any more time than I absolutely had to, so I gave the primer 48 hours of hot weather to dry and then started throwing on the water based paint. The result? Well, there's a saying "good lookin' from afar, but far from good looking."

Tell me that ain't gnarly. From 10 feet, the door looks fine. The moment you close distance, it's crater city. (It matches the quality of the paint job I had done on the house, so maybe I can blame them for this butchery too). I am not proud of it and honestly, it needs to be redone, but that isn't going to happen. If I feel ashamed enough, I might throw a skim coat of bondo and another 2 coats of paint over it. But I'm not going to be stripping the door and starting from scratch any time soon.

As a whole, I would say that my work on the front door was a net wash. The interior turned out better than before I started working on the door with the molding profile looking much sharper, but the  exterior is a marked disappointment.

At least the door frame turned out really nice.