Whoever painted our house before we moved in selected a really lovely shade of baby diarrhea brown for the front door. Naturally, we decided that we’d like to have an entrance to the house that skewed a little less scatological. In a perfect world, this would involve spritzing a little paint stripper on the door, letting it work its magic, and then scraping everything off to reveal a beautifully-grained slab of wood that could be stained, polyurethaned, and enjoyed for many years to come.
In reality, after fighting with the paint scraper for a while, I discovered that there was another layer of paint under the copro-tastic brown. I took a knife and scraped some of that to discover another layer of paint, so Plan B was activated: let’s replace the front door! We’ve done this zero times before, so why not? After taking a trip to Home Depot, we discovered that the opening for the front door was two inches shorter than a standard opening. No problem – let’s open up the wall and raise the header!
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