(Almost) Finishing Touches

Once the garage had been cleaned up and painted, I was really raring to get going on the trim. The existing trim was a combo of black and white, and the garage door itself had been especially scruff since I moved in. I should say, it had been scruff since well before I had moved in. Scruff = Dingy. Scruff = Dirty. Scruff = So-bad-that-I-had-planned-to-just-buy-a new-garage-door-when-I-moved-in.

I snapped a shot of it (just as I began priming over the black) to show it to you looking about as good as it could look, pre-paint.

The door had been hosed down throughly before I started priming (creating quite the mini-flood in the garage but I won’t get into details about that). I also Lysol’ed to almost no end and hand cleaned to get as much grime off it as possible. Still, it was definitely not crisp and fresh, nor white anymore. Great, right.

Side note: It’s not a bad idea to stock up on paints over holiday weekends like Memorial Day and 4th of July; most brands that sell at HD and Lowe’s offer that $5 rebate on every gallon of paint, meaning I saved $15 this weekend between the new gray porpoise, a good ol’ can of plain white, and the silver leaf paint that I used for the trim. Whoop!

Silver leaf was the best match I was able to find for the white aluminum trim that surrounds each window on the house – Behr W-F-720 (purchased in exterior satin, just like the paint I used for the cinder block). As I got started, it seemed like the gallon of paint was going to go pretty far this time around. I started by painting the areas of the garage door, shed door, and garage window that wouldn’t be easily accessible by roller.

It was immediately apparent how dramatic of a door clean-up this would be. Especially on the top part of the door, which oddly was much more discolored than the lower panels. The whole door is well protected from rainfall and weather because of the overhang, but the lower panels must get cleaned off more naturally than the top.

The follow-up work with a paint roller went reasonably quick, and the results were just as stunning as I wished for:

Another side note: You’re getting a hot glimpse of my neighbors silver carport in the reflection. It’s been there for 22 months now, driving me crazier each day.

You’ll notice that I didn’t use blue painter’s tape. And you’ll notice that I wasn’t even the least bit careful when it came to painting around the two panes of glass. In my experiences, it’s always been easier to be sloppy up front and clean up the mess with a razor blade; some paint is inevitably going to peek it’s way through the tape anyways, or the roller would splatter on the paned glass, and you’ll be doing the same thing anyways.

The post title includes the prefix ALMOST because the one thing I haven’t yet done is paint the cinderblock to the right of the door porpoise gray yet; I did remove the mass amounts of ivy that had taken up residence, but want to let the little roots (little ivy fingers) dry up a little so that I can try and scrub as many off as possible. The anxious person in me just wants to paint over them, but they’re everywhere, and the photo doesn’t do justice to how raised some of them are from the surface of the garage so I’m behaving this time and going to do it right.

But with that said, how does the painted door from the driveway? Oohs, ahhs.

And as I said, the garage’s side window and shed door got a good scrape-down, re-prime, and re-paint too. I also refinished the overhang edges, which were overdue for a clean-up. Ahhs, oohs.