We must do a little time traveling for this post – all the way back to July of 2014. The average temp was about 97°. We had a few soul-crushing +100° days, but we were rewarded with a handful of glorious mid-80° days too. Timing is important and I am profoundly grateful we didn’t try to build a house in the summer of 2011. For those who’ve blocked that terrible time from their memory, that’s the summer of seventy consecutive days over 100°, Austin was literally on fire, and our farmer regularly offered cactus alongside the wilted (but delicious) vegetables in our CSA shares – so July 2014 wasn’t so bad, comparatively. This is what I told myself each time I reached in my pocket for a woe is me card. It worked; my bellyachin’ was kept to a minimum.

The front door area looked like this for a ridiculously long time. So long, we got a little too comfortable and a little too lax and some thieving bandits made off with a generator and close to a thousand dollars worth of building material. The break in – or the more technically correct term walk in – lit a fire under our butts to get the door installed and locks in place.

The house design dictated a simple but massive door. We didn’t expect it to be so difficult to find a plain slab 4’x9’ door, but every off-the-shelf option was too small or included panels, carvings, inlays, or other decorative accents—which work well for Colonial, Craftsman, Victorian, and Tudor style homes, but not so much for the mid-century modern meets Dwell-style home the architect designed for us. Resdoor of Fort Worth saved the day by creating exactly what we needed.

It doesn’t look like much, but that’s a colossal door right there. It’s seven months later and I still have an immense amount of relief that we weren’t responsible for the installation.

Good job, Ruben!

That’s where Ruben’s work stopped and we took over…

I filled every nail hole until the sidelights looked like a toddler with calamine covered chicken pox. The caulk gun came out about this time too, but it wasn’t as funny as the pox of the chicken so there are no pictures of that work. Does anyone else think the reflection in the window resembles space travel in the Millennium Falcon? No? Well, you could see it if you were high from caulk and paint fumes.

We thought the primer color was bright…

…until it turned the color of Silly Putty next to the real door color, Sherwin Williams Daredevil (SW6882).

Primer – we briefly considered just leaving it like this.

But after seeing the real door color, we’re glad we didn’t.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but based on the photos on my phone, we ate black lentils and carrots while we did this work. I’m taking this as proof of my greatest fear: I have a one-track mind and lack the ability to multitask. It’s a good thing I had neither the time nor the inclination to apply makeup during this part of the project because I was liable to walk away from the mirror looking like a Halloween costume.

While we worked on the door, the bricklayers started their work. The concrete guys poured the front porch too, which was bittersweet for me: I was grateful for the smooth, solid surface because moving a large ladder between the woven rebar was a major pain in my ass, but I also hated to lose our fake Grauman’s Chinese Theater…

…especially the little raccoon handprints.

I think our little raccoon friend might be a distant cousin of Gregory Peck.

image courtesy of alexander cunningham’s flickr page

Mark installed the door handle and we promptly locked ourselves out of the house. Or at least we thought we did. Turns out we just didn’t know how to work the door knob. I blame the paint fumes. Don’t worry, we’ve got the ‘getting into the house’ thing down now. Push button garage door openers are a godsend.

It was about this time that I realized I wasn’t happy with the white trim. The balance was off. It needed to be bolder. So out came the paint brush and the paint fumes again.

This is how the front door area looks today. It still needs work, namely another coat of Daredevil, a sweet starburst doorknob thingy*, a proper walkway from the street to the house, and some landscaping. Those things will have to wait until better weather or until our paint-addled brains fully recover, whichever comes first.

*Doorknob thingy