Painting Our Garage Doors Blue
Our garage and driveway take up most of our backyard and I have tried several ways to make it look prettier (here’s one). But I only just recently went more drastic in a budget-friendly way: I painted the garage doors entirely!
Choosing Paint Colors
The rationale behind this is simple: when your garage takes up your backyard either you’re going to hate the backyard or you’re going to have to find a way to really like the garage. In lieu of spending money to change doors or renovate it in any way, I decided to paint the doors.
I wanted to create an ombre effect for more visual interest and I also wanted to use this opportunity to test out paint colors for whenever we decide to paint the exterior of our home far in the future.
Our garage doors have four rows, one of which is a row of windows. To create the ombre effect, I wanted four different blues to gradually get darker from top to bottom. After testing out several, I went with Revel Blue SW 6530 for the top row, Indigo Batik SW 7602 for the third row, and Anchors Aweigh SW 9179 for the bottom row. For the second row, I created a 50/50 mix of the first two colors to create this fourth color. (These are all Sherwin-Williams colors and I must disclose that Sherwin-Williams is a client of my PR agency.)
Vinyl or Metal?
Before buying the paint, I had to know if the material was vinyl or any other material since not all colors are available for vinyl. Lucky for me, the garage doors are metal. I know this by touch but also by using a magnet to see if it stuck. Almost all metals are magnetic, except for aluminum and galvanized steel. A magnet stuck so that confirmed the surface is metal.
The Good and the Less Good
Overall, the painting was easy to do. I should have taped the edges around the doors a lot better but I’ll admit that I was lazy and just wanted to get them painted.
And the other mistake I made was blending two of the colors rather than not going with a distinctly different fourth color. While the doors came out well and I love the blues and the overall effect, the first three rows of the garage doors blend a little too well and the darkest color at the bottom is a bit of an outlier.
Easy Solution to a Design Problem
But, again, I love the overall improvement. Now that the doors are a darker color, the garage looks like an intentional backdrop to our outdoor hangouts. And because they’re the various colors of the night sky, the garage also seemingly blends in more with our surroundings at night rather than sticking out bright white.
This project was an easy DIY solution to an aesthetic problem that has been bugging me for years! And now we also have a sense of what paint color we might want for our exterior. Can you guess which one it is?
So what do you think of the garage door paint job? Would you take on a project like this?
