Frugal Babe

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Our DIY Storm Door

April 2, 2007 By Frugal Babe

We live near a wonderful Habitat for Humanity thrift store.   They sell all the usual thrift store stuff, but they also have a home improvement section, with appliances, windows, doors, lights, plumbing fixtures, etc.   In January, they had a bunch of storm doors, still in their original packaging.   I’m not sure if they were overstock or had just been donated to Habitat, but they were sweet doors and  Habitat was selling them for $100 each.   They only came in one color – “cranberry” which is like a deep reddish maroon color.   Our front door was bright red, but a bit faded, so I started thinking maybe we could paint it to match.    We decided to go ahead and get the storm door, and when we went back, they were on sale for $50!!   Whoo hoo!   So we brought home the door and took a piece of it to Home Depot to get matching paint.  

After that, we had about  five weeks of bad weather, then we were out of town for the next three weekends.   This past weekend, we had set aside for home improvement projects, and the weather was beautiful.   I painted our front door on Saturday, and then we spent  half of Sunday following the very convoluted directions that came with the storm door.   It took us forever, but we now have a beautiful storm door (it’s very fancy – it even has it’s own deadbolt!) and a matching front door.   And since we did all the work ourselves, it only cost us $50 for the door and about $30 for the paint.   We have lots of leftover paint, so maybe we’ll find something else that needs to be painted that shade!

Not only does the entryway look much better,  I’m also excited about the energy saving aspect of the storm door.   I bet it will pay for itself within a couple years.  

Now to find the motivation to finish painting the downstairs…

update:   here are the pictures…

outside view of the storm door

the original front door that we painted to match the storm door

Filed Under: Our stuff, ways we save $$ 2 Comments

Comments

  1. Chaucey says

    April 3, 2007 at 7:20 am

    Hi. I’d love to see a picture of your handiwork. yay for the nice price.

    Reply

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