A BIG new project!

What do you do if your garage door makes your garage look like a storage shed? You practice a little magic with paint. We moved into our home a year and a half ago. The house, built in 1937, has required lots of updates. In fact, we took down some flocked metallic wallpaper in our bathroom this week and found that the paper hanger had signed and dated the wall. The date is December of 1970! We were pretty sure the last time any decorating had been done to the house was in the late 60s or early 70s and this confirmed it. But, I digress. The garage door is in very good condition, but it is very dull and uninteresting.

Because the door is in such good condition, we did not want to replace it. So we decided to paint it. We first decided how we wanted the door to look. We settled on a carriage house look. We saved wrought iron hinges from the kitchen when we tore it out last summer so they can be applied to the garage door and we bought handles. The door will look like it is two doors that open from the sides. This technique is called trompe l'oeill (French for "fool the eye"--a painted illusion) Our next step was to submit a request to the Historic Board in our city to get permission to do our project.

Once we knew what we wanted the door to look like, we measured and then I graphed the door using 1 square to one inch. My graph paper was only big enough to do half the door. The other half is a mirror image of the graph.

Tonight we started to paint. We measured and taped off the "windows" and then painted them black. In the morning we need to put on a second coat of paint and then remove the tape. Stay tuned for the next steps.