Beginning to Paint a Garage Door

I got started this week on a new project to paint a garage door to look like wood.  Actually I started the job on Friday with the prep work.  Ordinarily I do not take on a garage door in the condition this one was in.  This garage door had been painted to look like wood but whoever did the work used the wrong products and it cracked and peeled in less than a year.  This garage door is not a steel door it is a wood composite and so you can sand on this type of door which makes it feasible to remove the  oil based products that were applied to it.

That is why you need to use the correct products when painting on garage doors.  When you use the right products the work will last indefinitely.

Here is a shot of the garage door mostly cleaned up and by cleaned up I mean all the oil based product taken off it except for those 4 beveled areas on the panels.

You can see how the oil based products are cracking and peeling up.  The whole door basically looked like that when I started.  In order to get it off I used a sander on all the flat areas which took about a half day.  Then I had to scrap and sand off the beveled areas around each panel.  That took 2 and a half days mostly because I had to hand scrap and sand because there was no way to get a sander in there effectively. As an example it took two hours to clean up the four beveled areas shown.

So I finally got the garage door cleaned up and then primed the entire door.  You can see the nice light gray primer on the top two rows.

After the primer dried I applied the basecoat paint.  For this garage door I used a Sherwin Williams color called Tatami Tan.  You can see in the next picture how that looks.  Tomorrow I will start on the wood graining.