We learned the hard way that painting a door is the kinda thing you gotta do right the first time… (insert ‘you don’t get a second chance at a first impression’ metaphor here).

Once upon a time, I saw a pair of French doors painted glossy black on Pinterest. It was love at first sight. “Hot damn that looks snazzy,” I murmured under my breath, vowing at that moment that I would one day have black French doors in my home.

By the time the look made it into our style guide (yes we have a style guide, yes I will probably share it at some point), I had extended the black door look to the interior and exterior sides of our front door and rear patio door. Of course we also planned on installing a pair of black French doors in all their glory to the foyer-adjacent office, but that plan got relocated to the ‘delayed projects’ list in favor of our accidental kitchen remodel.

When we were stocking up on house paint at Sherwin Williams, we also picked up a gallon of SnapDry in the color ‘Tricorn,’ which is what we used to paint our handrails and doors black.

Our first attempt was the front entryway door. “Easy,” we thought. (Our egos were still inflated from our awesome fireplace paint job).

Spoiler alert: painting doors is not actually that easy.

The SnapDry paint was the worst of both worlds: it was annoyingly thick and gloppy on the brush, but it applied thin and streaky. The glossy finish isn’t very forgiving, either. (Judging by how phenomenal the paint looks on our banisters, I’m going to chalk this up to ‘user error.’)

Our tools didn’t help: we used a 3″ paintbrush and a sponge brush, which we naively figured would make it easier to paint around the contours and crevices. Nope. The sponge was fine for touching up and cutting around the window, but a high-density foam mini-roller is what makes the difference.

At least it looks good from afar, right?

The visible brushstroke grain wasn’t terrible (at least not so terrible that we’d divert our guests to use another entrance), and R actually liked how it looked… but we did sand down some of the texture and smoothed on a second coat with the roller, just to make it a bit more polished.

When we got to the back patio door, we were seasoned pros and went straight for the roller.

There are two ways to go about this: I could mask off the glass on each individual pane, or I could paint like an absolute maniac and scrape off the paint after it dried.

After several days straight of painting, I was not in the emotional state to be anywhere near painter’s tape… so I went for the latter:

Don’t worry — it’s ridiculously easy (and satisfying!) to scrape the paint off the glass! (I used a putty knife).

Hey, good lookin’!

(Those are paint scrapings on the floor… I’m not that lazy of a painter!)

The door looked even better once we got the walls painted grey: