How to Stain a Front Door to Look Like Real Wood (FOR LESS THAN $20!)

in this video i'm going to show you how to stain your front door to make it look like a wood door for less than 20 bucks this is what the door will look like when you're finished and the only things you'll need is gel stain and a paintbrush and then if your door is a different color you will need to buy some tan primer to paint it beforehand but that's the stain we got right there from lowe's [Music] good morning so today i'm going to be doing a quick little tutorial on how to stain a fiberglass front door to make it look like wood when james and i were purchasing our front door i really wanted a wood front door but realistically i didn't want to have to restain it every couple of years and do the upkeep that comes with a real wood door so we went for fiberglass so this door was a very expensive door and it's the door that i really wanted so we went ahead and got it but to get it pre-stained and finished it was over two thousand dollars extra and i obviously didn't want to pay that so we figured out a way to stand ourselves so this over here i already have done i didn't record myself doing this side because i didn't know what i was doing yet but now that i've done it some i'm kind of familiar with what to do and i feel better about it so i'm just making a quick little tutorial because this is something that anyone could do as a quick little diy project to make your front door either updated or to paint a new one that you wanted to save money on so this is the stain that i bought you do have to buy a gel stain and this is what's recommended from the manufacturer our door is a therma true door but it just has to be a gel stain i went with the hickory stain just because i wanted more of a natural wood look so you can do it one of two ways when i first started doing it i would put a lot on and then i had an old rag and i would just wipe it off i come to find out that it's actually easier if you just put a little glass on your paint brush and you just keep spreading it around and keep spreading it around until it gets down to the consistency now with normal stain you want to put it on kind of neat up and down but with this i found it actually works better if you just kind of circle around to get in all the grooves so if you'll zoom in real close here you can see that actually on the door our door does have like a little bit of like this grainy stuff it's hard to see in the video but there are grains so you want to make sure you get the stain into those grains so when i'm painting i pretty much just go like this and you just kind of wiggle the stain around wiggle the stain around like so and you just keep wiggling around till it gets in all the nooks and crannies and then instead of wiping the excess off you can just keep picking it back up with the paint brush and moving it down on your door until you get it to the consistency that you want and then you obviously don't want to have any really dark patches so then you just kind of pull it down like this and then just keep going oh and then what i also do is i start just doing a side next to it like this and you can just take some of the stain from that side and add it over here and then depending on how dark you want it so if you want it to be really light then you can wipe it away all you do is take a rag and you just like this and then now if you look up close all you see is the stain that's actually in the grain part of the door but there's not actually any stain on the door i want a darker look so i'm gonna mix my stain in back over that part of the door and i'm going to keep coming down here making sure i get in every crack now this stain does dry pretty quick so you want to do it in sections a little bit at a time that way that you don't end up with it like completely black just keep going like that now i was actually gonna do our door a little bit lighter but i had to end up doing it darker because this part of the door like this front part that i'm staining now is a really smooth texture it doesn't really absorb any of the stain it just goes on top of it but this part of the door is actually more like a matte finish whereas this is more like a satin finish so where the matte finish is it absorbs so much stain and it's really hard to get this part really really light so over here on this side if you'll come over here this here i could have gotten really light but i could not get this part of the door that light which is why the door is this dark so anyway i really like how it's turning out it's time consuming but i think it looks really good and it kind of has that rustic wood look that i wanted and instead of spending two thousand dollars to get it to look like this it only cost me about 16 bucks and there you have it this part of the door is done i'll zoom in closer so you can see it it's got a nice wood grain look and i like the imperfections that it's not perfectly as dark in some spots as it is in the other because it makes it look more like real wood [Music] all right i'm going to wipe a little bit of this off because it's a little bit darker than i want it to be especially around those edges i'm just going to kind of go like this a little bit off and then smooth it back out [Music] so i'm going to work on finished staining the outside of the door as you can see the top part layer is not done so i'm going to try to get that finished today this part isn't done either i gotta add just a little bit more to make that part a little bit darker so if i have time i might try to do that today but anyway working on the door again [Music] silly iphones do not like to work really well when it's cold outside anyway sorry eliza's playing with his toys there but anyway i did get the front of the door done almost i got to do some second coats in some areas but i really like how it turned out i'll show you guys i couldn't get much footage of it because unfortunately my phone kept shutting off because it's cold but here it is [Music] i love how this door turned out especially considering how easy and inexpensive it was to finish this project we use it as backdrops all the time family photos before we go places and honestly it hasn't chipped off it still looks fantastic

Channel: Collins Country

Views: 96,950

Keywords: Collins country, DIY, minwax, paintedfrontdoor, buildyourownhouse, beforeandafter, howtopaintadoor, homeimprovement, farmhouse, modernfarmhouse

Id: -4gMfMisJ6w

Length: 7min 47sec (467 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 13 2021