A Beautiful and Surprisingly Affordable Garage Door Makeover

My garage door has definitely seen better days. Every time I pull my car into the garage, I look at my poor banged-up garage door and sigh a little bit. But I haven’t actually done anything about it until recently, because I was convinced that my only option was to replace the garage door entirely, and I wasn’t quite ready to commit to such a financial investment. A week or so ago, I had just about had it with my garage door, and was almost ready to start calling around for quotes, when I saw a post featuring a garage door makeover on Ahna Fulmer.

Her garage door transformation opened my eyes to the possibility of not replacing my garage door, but simply giving it a fresh, new look. And better yet, this simple project turns any standard garage door into a faux “carriage” door, a country-chic style that I’ve always loved. So I decided I would give it a shot, and BOY was I surprised at how well it turned out! My garage now looks like a million bucks from the street, and not only did it take me about 30 minutes to complete, but the whole thing cost me about $80 in supplies. Spending $80 on a DIY makeover, rather than spending $1,000 or more on a new garage door, is a HUGE win in my book! Read on to learn how I did it, and how easy it is to do your own garage door makeover!

Related: These 9 Useful Products Will Help You Fix Anything

“Carriage-Style” Garage Door Makeover

You’ll need:

• Decorative Garage Door Accents hardware kit
• Black exterior paint-and-primer, satin finish
• Paintbrush
• Painter’s tape

Start by preparing the hardware. Stick the round pads over the magnets to prevent the hardware from scratching.

Then place the hardware on your desired locations on your garage door. Simple as that!

Next, you’ll create your windows. There are simulated window kits for garage doors that you can purchase online, but they’re quite expensive! A more affordable option is to create the illusion of windows with a coat of black paint.

Tape off the top rectangular sections on your garage door. (We chose to leave the two outside sections alone, because the frame of my garage door angles in at the corners.)

You can either fill each section in completely with your black exterior paint, or you can use intersecting pieces of painter’s tape to create a “paned” look. We chose to fill in each section entirely, just to keep things simple.

And that’s it! A total garage face-lift, from start to finish, in about a half hour. I’m so happy with how it turned out, and I wish I would have done it a long time ago! :-)

Here are a couple of additional tips I wanted to mention, based on our experience with this project:

• If you’re having the same hot summer days that we are here in Utah, set aside some time at the beginning or end of the day to do your painting. We ended up painting in the heat of the day, around 2pm, and we found out that paint gets pretty finicky in the heat!
• If you have access to a pressure washer (or even a high powered spray nozzle for your hose), use it to clean your garage door before starting. Painting over dirt is messy, and could also prevent the paint from adhering properly.

What’s your favorite affordable home makeover project?

NEW! Can you guess the 5-letter word related to today’s post?

More Ideas You'll Love

How To Turn An Old T-shirt Into The Perfect Head Wrap

Just found a hole in your softest t-shirt? Never fear — you can easily give it new life as a useful and versatile head wrap! Continue Reading