If you know me IRL, or you follow me on IG, you know that for two weeks earlier this month C and I put our blood, sweat, and tears (there were no tears, mostly just anger and a lot of sighing and some wine) into making our new screen door. Last summer when we moved in I knew that this was something we should install next summer. Our upstairs windows are new and have screens, but the main floor windows do not currently have screens in them. We have a front door and a back door and all last year we would open both doors and get an amazing breeze all through our house. We also got a lot of bugs in our house throughout the day and couldn’t keep our doors open at night due to the aforementioned bugs. I briefly skimmed the internet last summer for screen doors and knew that this was going to be a bigger project than just placing an order on Wayfair for a door and calling it a day. Which is why we just kicked the project down the road to deal with this year.

Finding A Door & Picking A Style

This took a while. Like, way longer than it should have. In fact, it made me wonder if no one uses screen doors anymore? I scoured the internet looking for something, anything, that people had written, posted, or shared about in their journey to a screen door. I found ONE detailed post. (shout out to this woman) It was very helpful and we basically did everything these people did. Still, I found it strange no one has done this before. Which I why I decided to share our entire process. And why C would come find me mid-sanding and make sure I was documenting and getting photos I needed to share here, lol.

The Door We Chose

A lot of screen doors lean in to a farmhouse style. That’s the vibe of that post mentioned above, too. I knew I could get a craftsman style look so long as I could find a door and stain and hardware that went that direction. But finding the actual door was such a challenge. I found some at Rejuvenation, but the order would have been final sale and you can’t call and talk to a carpenter because Rejuvenation is just selling directly from the company that makes the product. The doors on Wayfair seemed really cheap to me and I wanted the door to look good since it’s literally going to be our front door and what every single person that’s passing our house looks at. I was also dealing with weird and wonky dimensions since our house is an older gal with a lot of character and fun sizing! I even checked out Etsy to see if I could work with a carpenter through a small shop (like we did with our baby gate in our rental home) but that wasn’t really leading me to anything. Once I found this post (again, thank you to this person I found on pinterest who shared her screen door journey!) and saw that this woman had a good experience with Coppa Woodworking, AND that this company had sooo many design options for doors, I decided this is the direction we should go.

Coppa Woodworking was amazing. I was nervous because there weren’t many reviews on the internet for them, but I was able to call and talk to them and ask them my many questions (which wood to choose? why type of screen option is best?!) and the woman on the phone was super helpful. We picked our door we wanted and then we measured and re-measured and then placed the order over the phone. The door showed up about three weeks later. I also saved about $400 ordering from Coppa Woodworking instead of buying the exact same door from Rejuvenation.

We choose the 12 pain Douglas Fir door with the tough screen. It’s style number 3610-T.

Choosing A Stain

This also took a while. And felt so daunting. I knew nothing about the world of stains and it felt very scary and like a science experience where you don’t exactly know what you’re going to get. Every blog post and youtube video I watched people would vehemently explain that “every wood is different!” and “you can test, but you don’t know what you’re going to get until it’s on your piece of wood!!!” which made me even more intimidated. I’m a very decisive and confident person when it comes to paint colors, but with stain I felt like I couldn’t make any decision because I had no idea what I was doing.

These are some articles I did find helpful: 1) Testing 6 Different Stains, 2) Stains On Pine, 3) It’s like 10 Years Old…But Still Helpful

We ended up choosing 4 different stains to test as well as a Simply White to see if it would neutralize the door and not make it too brown and ‘farmhouse-y’. At this point in the process I was thinking I wanted a more Scandinavian look with muted brown tones.

We tested all of them on a big slab of Douglas Fir to see how they looked. You can see how they looked on the photo below. Bottom row has a coat of the simply white stain. You can see how much whiter the stains are.

The Staining

On a Saturday morning before everyone was awake, C got started on the sanding. I rolled out of bed around 7am and came outside sipping my morning coffee watching him finishing up the sanding and beginning the conditioner process. We had a schedule for the day and the goal was to get all staining done that Saturday and by Sunday night have almost all of the sealing done. It was a beautiful day and we’d much rather have been out hiking or doing literally anything else, but at least the weather was cooperating.

We ended up deciding to do a coat of the simply white and then do the english chestnut with potentially a second coat of english chestnut. The test we did for these three coats came out great. It wasn’t sticky and I liked the color. We felt good about it.

Where Things Got Weird

Throughout the day things got a little wonky. The first coat of the simply white was put on too thick. Then when we went in with the english chestnut it was drying and feeling a little sticky and inconsistent. When we went and applied the second coat of english chestnut (third overall coat) we started to realize that….our first go was a fail. The door was so sticky and tacky, and not drying, and hours after applying it was getting all over our hands when we touch the surface. By Saturday night we were so discouraged and frustrated and sort of at a loss of what to do. We both felt like we’d ruined the door and in the back of our minds, even though we hadn’t mentioned it to each other, knew that stripping and starting over was in our future. The worst.

Enter: Mineral Spirits

On Sunday we got home from church, put the kids down for a nap, and got to work. The goal was to get the entire door sanded and basically back to square one (great feeling…) by the end of the day so we could start with *actual staining* on Monday morning. We did the mineral spirits, C went out and bought a power sander, and by the time the kids were up from their naps we had gotten the door back down to the bare wood. I’m impressed with how quickly we worked, to be honest. We were pissed, but there was no time to wallow around in our mistakes.

Starting The Process Over

Sunday night we conditioned the door (and nearly ran out of conditioner in the process) and then busted out the first coat of stain. We decided to skip the simply white and go straight to the chestnut because the simply white was being weird and not allowing the stain to soak into the wood. Which is why it was not drying or getting wiped off properly.

I can’t tell you how nervous we both were as C applied the first stroke of stain. I was biting my lip and covering my eyes hoping it was going to look okay and soak into the wood. And it did!! PHEW. One coat of the stain felt and looked good. We called it for the night and decided to pick it up the next day and not think about how we were technically supposed to be done with the door by this point.

The next night after the kids were in bed we realized the inner parts of the panels didn’t get sanded enough and did not take the stain. They were still pretty white from that dang simply white stain we’d used. We decided to sand down again the inner panels and re-do the stain. We wanted it to be right. We had to do this by hand because of the awkwardness of getting in-between all the edges of the panels. It was so annoying, but I’m glad we did it and made it right. We re-stained these on Monday night and then finally (finally!) the door was ready for sealing on Tuesday.

On Tuesday morning C sealed the first side, and then that night he did the other side. Wednesday morning we woke up before the kids and knocked out a second coat on both sides in the morning. Thursday before work C got the final coat of sealant done. What was supposed to take two days took six days. It was as fun as it sounds – ha!

Installing The Screen & Hanging The Door

The last step we did was insert the screen and hang the door to the house. We watched this YouTube video on how to install it and used some random tools we had to push the rubber seal into the crevice. C had already marked where the hinges and door knob were going to go long before our staining journey began. It was pretty straightforward to hang, and we attached this soft door closer to the base of the door.

We couldn’t believe we finished it and we’ve been using it every day. It even looks pretty from the inside! I can’t wait to install a (much easier) screen situation for our backdoor.