WARNING: This is a long post!
One of my best friends, Brooke ("Bennett") asked Will & I at the beginning of the year if we would convert an old door into a coffee table for her. We (obviously) said yes! We had never done this before but figured it couldn't be that hard. I mean, you've pretty much just have to slap some legs on it, right? Well, it ended up being more complicated than that and took much, much longer to complete than we had thought, but I think that the final product turned out great! First, we had to find a door. I know from being an antique store-aholic that I had seen old doors selling from about the $175 and up price range. Luckily, Bennett had another option. Her husband owns a property management company and he just happened to have some old doors lying around at his office. What's even cooler is that his office is on historic Broad Ave. in Memphis and the door that Bennett ended up picking out was the original door from his office building. So it was pretty old! Will did pretty much all of the hard work. I helped paint and re-did the fixtures, but Will worked so hard on it! Unfortunately we totally forgot to take a picture of the door before we started on it, but you can pretty much understand what an old door looks like.
After finding the perfect door, Will ended up cutting off about 2 feet from the bottom. It was a really tall door and that part ended up being rotten wood anyway so it worked out. That way we were able to make the door even on all sides. Below is the first photo of the door that we took. This was after Will had sanded off a bunch of old, white paint. This took a pretty good while to do in order to get down to the original wood surface. We ended up not even sanding the bottom because you weren't going to see it anyway. We weren't going to paint the bottom either, but it turned out that you could see some of the bottom's white paint from the top windows. Another aspect that ended up being the most frustrating thing was trying to get all of the windows clean! It gets me frustrated just thinking about it!! It was so hard to scrape off all of that old paint from the windows.
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| Front of the door-after sanding |
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| Bottom of the door-pretty much exactly what the front looked like! |
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| After Will had done a lottttt of scraping on the windows |
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| This is the paint we used. I probably wouldn't use it again if I had the option. It was some kind of Gel-Flow technology that I wasn't a fan of. |
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| Painting over the old paint on the bottom! |
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| Working hard! |
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| After spraying the door fixtures with primer--Forgot to take a Before photo of those as well. They were all yucky old brass. |
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| After putting the legs on and in the process of painting the top. |
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| Finished product!! |
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| We ended up using cedar 4x4's for the legs and support beams. All we did was put 3 coats of Polycrylic on them so they will hold their color. I think it turned out great! |
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| The knocker! After they were primed I used Antique Brass spray paint |
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| My favorite! |
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| Here it is in Bennett's living room! |
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| This is a photo she sent me a few days after we dropped it off! |
So what do you think?!
