It's been about a year since it became clear that our original contractor wasn't going to be tackling our outside doors and we enlisted the services of our metal worker Alex. Alex, as I've said before, is a fantastic worker with an incredible eye for detail and a strong worth ethic. His only problem is his glacial work pace which we've become accustomed to. At least we know after all the waiting the job will be done perfectly though. In that long year Alex first tackled the downstairs door which is built like a tank and clad in stainless steel. He finished the frames of the door above the stoop a few months ago so all that remained was the door itself and some final pieces of trim. It was our plan to clad this door in stainless too, but at some point I came up with the idea that this would be too much stainless and asked about options for a painted door. Alex and I discussed wrapping a wooden door in powder coated steel and cutting out three square windows framed in stainless and with the blue 3-form material and glass windows. Powder coating is a process that essentially bakes the paint into the steel to prevent rusting, chipping and fading so we thought that better than just standard painting for such a high traffic door. So Alex made the door and window units and his studio and finally set this past Wednesday as the installation day. But this being our house, nothing ever goes so smoothly.

Alex's truck broke down on Wednesday so he had to enlist the help of a friend to get the door over. Regardless, they arrived very late in the day and although they did get the old door off and the new door on, they were not able to close the door due to the buckling door threshold and the uneven original wood frame. Alex chiseled out the old marble threshold (yes, the marble was buckling…think about how odd that is for a second) but needed a different tool to even out the wood frame. At about 8 pm he gave up for the day and put the old door back on in the interim. Then he was back again Thursday morning and worked on the frame throughout the rest of the day and was finally able to get it up and running smoothly. However we had problem with the lock since the offset of the old door was 5 inches and the offset of the new door was 2 3/8 inches. Also, the new knob hole was lower than the old hole. Alex was able to move the old magnetic lock catch down on the frame and rig up the old doorknob with new standard offset knob innards until we could get a locksmith out to put a new fancy lock on.

The locksmith set us up with a vestibule doorknob (so it's always locked on the outside and always open on the inside—hurray!) with a Mul-T-Lock cylinder and fancy new Mul-T-Lock high security, non-bumpable keys. Then on Friday afternoon Alex was back to install the new aluminum threshold and caulk the windows into place. There is a still a bit more cladding to do around the frame, so Alex will be back at the end of the month (after his well deserved vacation) to finish up the last of it.

But for now here's our extremely blue door:

It's not quite the color I selected, but in all fairness it was a tiny swatch that I picked from. I thought the blue would be a bit more muted, a bit more gray and I must admit that the brightness of this blue caught me off guard at first and I wasn't sure what to think. It was supposed to be closer to the color of the blue glass windows, but now that it's been up for a few days the bold blue is really growing on me. I'm sure the neighbors hate it but that's nothing new. I was going for people describing this as the house with the blue door and I think I got my wish.

Next we need to paint all this boring gray stucco on the ground floor and around the step a more attractive color and do something with the front yard. But it's coming along.