Mini-Home-Makeover: The Front Door

I thought I'd start the week off by giving you a little peak into my home and sharing with you a mini-home project my husband and I recently worked on.

Our home is a one-bedroom condo in Sherman Oaks (Los Angeles), California, which we purchased late last year. Our condominium complex is an older building (built in the 1970s) and most everything visible from the interior common areas is outdated --including the front doors.

Our Homeowners Association requires all our front doors to be the same. This means that unfortunately we're stuck with what we've got until everyone in the building agrees to change them (which likely won't be any time in the near future!). Here's what our door looks like:

It's not a terrible looking door, it just doesn't fit in with our interior decor. The good news is that although we can't do anything about how it looks like on the side visible from the condo common areas, we can do whatever we want on the side visible from the interior of our unit. So, I thought -why not paint the interior side? Who cares if its one color one side and another color on the other side!

I found two inspiration doors that I fell in love with. This first inspiration door is from Amy Smart's 2,000-square-foot, two-bedroom cottage in Beverly Hills.

This second inspiration door was featured in the main editorial section of the last issue of Domino magazine. It's from twenty-something designer Michael Bargo's New York apartment.

So late last week, my husband graciously agreed to give our door a few coats of high-gloss black paint while I was away at work (he has two-weeks off from school!). To my delight, I came home to find a shiny, sophisticated version of our door. I added a little extra style by hanging a framed postcard from our trip to Paris. Here's what it looks like now:

What a difference a little paint can do no? Total cost was about $20! About $10 for the paint (from Lowe's), and about $10 for the frame (from Michael's). Stay tuned for future posts about our mini home makeover projects!