Ohhhhh the joy. Have you ever had a great idea that seemed so simple in your head, but executing the idea in real life turned out to be an entirely new dimension of crazy? That was this door for me.
So the story began in Delaware in my father-in-laws barn. We were in town for their wedding and Superman was building new barn doors for him. I was snooping around, providing moral support, exploring the attic and all the old rustic barn coolness and fell in love with this door.
They were going to use it for the wedding as a backdrop for photos but said we could have it after the wedding! **cue the happy dance** We loaded it up in the truck and took it on the 12-hour drive back to Tennessee. Then the crazy began.
First I thought I'd sand it and paint over the old paint. But once I started chipping off some of the old paint and saw the original wood, I couldn't help myself. Change of plans... ALL the paint had to come off.
I tried to strip the paint. One week and a can of stripper later, only a couple inches of paint removed. My brother suggested using a wire brush to blaze the paint off. It worked but it was damaging the wood so bad and still took a LONG time to get any kind of results. After another week of trying we handed it over to a professional just to get the paint off.
This is what it looked like after a professional worked on it for 10 hours!! Water damage, old putty sunken into the wood.. all the stuff you can expect from an ancient door. lol!
I spent the next couple days staining and sealing it and I've got to admit, it's not what I expected! lol! Throughout the process I was thinking "ahh that scratch is fine, it'll be rustic" .."yeah, it's okay that that's all patched up.. rustic charm!" Yeah, no.. this is more like rustic meets haunted.
I was hesitant to put it up.. actually people voted on instagram to help decide if we would keep it like this or paint it and we had more votes to keep it so here we are! You'll definitely know if you've made it to our house or not, that's for certain! ;-)
Thanks for reading!
xoxo
D