Painting metal garage doors

Making Your Garage Doors “Fit” With The Rest Of Your Home

Perhaps you’ve just moved into your dream home, or maybe you’ve just had the exterior of your home refinished to suit your discriminating tastes.  Your garage door, being both expensive to replace and a pain in the butt to remove, likely hasn’t changed, and chances are good that it’s clashing with the rest of your home.  It’s unfortunate, but it’s also a sad reality: the garage door is often completely separate in the eyes of the overall design.

Well, it shouldn’t be...
Every time you look at your home the first thing that you are going to see is the massive space of discoloration if the garage door doesn’t match with the rest of your home.  Luckily for you it’s relatively easy to make the garage doors conform to the rest of your home- it just takes a bit of work.

• Paint
  Ahh, paint.  For some, painting represents all that’s wrong with the world.  For others, it’s a way to express themselves in a medium that is universally acceptable and easy to appreciate.  I, unfortunately, fall into the first category, which is why I find painting to be such a chore.
  
  However, don’t let the chore of painting deter you from the task at hand.  Garage doors are generally large and flat, making them simple to paint.  The whole job, from prep to final coat, will take just over a day as you will have to apply two or three coats since the garage is outside and exposed to the elements.
  
  Choose a color that matches your décor, and before you go buck-wild and paint the entire surface of the garage door you should probably test a small area to ensure that you can actually live with the result.  If the color suits your tastes then you’re set- grab a roller or two, a boom box (for some tunes), and go crazy.  Apply a coat of primer, and once it’s dried apply the first coat of paint.  Be sure to shield any areas that you don’t want painted from splash back or overspray.  Also, make sure that the coat has dried before you apply a new one.
  
  The best time to paint is before mid-day.  Painting when the sun is beating on the area will cause the paint to flash prematurely, inhibiting its ability to self-level into various pores and crevices.  The best time seems to be in the evening with the company of a few friends and a couple of cocktails.

• Physical decoration
  Don’t want to paint your garage door?  I don’t blame you- painting has got to be one of the most annoying things ever.  But that still leaves you with a problem: how do you make your garage door fit into your design theme better?
  
  The answer, of course, is by disguising it with decorations.  Trim kits, emblems, numbers, letters, pictures- anything that you can tack on the garage (with a bit of discretion, of course) to shield its true appearance.  Adding a trim kit and some lettering (such as “His” and “Hers”) is a fun way to change the appearance of the garage door without having to do anything too drastic.