The Difference a Door Makes

I love the new door to our garage!  It hadn't hit me how much I love it until I was taking pictures of the girls by the pool  I'm so use to shooting them from angles where the door would be out of frame because it was so ugly. I forgot how freeing it is to just take a picture without having to frame it just right.  

This is what the door use to look like. It's in the background.  I had to search hard to find this picture. Like I said, I did everything possible to avoid having that ugly thing in any picture! I don't even want to get into the details of how it got so ugly!

So, back to our pretty place!  I really love the door when I see a picture like this:

Or a picture like this. The door is not the focal point when it's pretty. It's a beautiful background feature but when the door was ugly. It became center stage no matter how in the background it was. 

The door is actually the same door that was there before.  The painters painted it white and then added the wood slats to match the rest of our wood fencing.  It's such a huge difference and the cost was minimal compared to buying a new door and minuscule compared to buying a new modern door. That was going to cost us a pretty penny;  in the $1200 to $2000 range! It wasn't just the door that needed help. It was the framing of the door that needed some major clean up work.  Fortunately, it was all taken care of when we had the house painted.  Note to self: when hiring a painter make sure they have a carpenter on staff or they know how to do great wood working.  

Screen Door

One of the many little, yet important things we had to do around here was get a screen for the sliding glass door that leads to the patio.  We got around to it during the hottest week this summer. Now that it's cooled off we're getting to enjoy it very much.

I broke the last screen in two!  Annika was a baby at the time. I had her in my arms and was walking to the kitchen thinking about what to make for dinner when bam!  I walked right into it! Fortunately I didn't fall with Annika.  So when I called the screen guys they suggested the tougher heavy duty screen, specially for the daily use with kids. 

The other thing they cautioned us about before leaving was that we weren't in the habit of having a screen and could easily walk into it again.  We gently placed one of Annika's works of art on the screen until we remember that it's there.

I liked the screen guys we used.  A year ago I saw their truck on the road and I took a picture of it at a stop light.  I had to hunt the picture down in iphoto but I'm glad I found it.  I made a few other calls but their prices and services didn't seem seem very good over the phone.  Screen Mobile was fantastic. They came to our house and made a door to fit in under an hour.