Are you looking for a cheap, cheerful and high impact way to add some instant curb appeal to the front of your house this season? We love this idea — reader MidCenturyThriftyGal shows us how she used our favorite mid century paint collection to transform her plain garage door into a cheery mid century modern garage door.
MidCenturyThrifty Gal didn’t need to buy a new garage door to get the modern garage door design she wanted. Instead, she used her existing garage door … chose two colors from the Sherwin Williams Suburban Modern paint collection that complemented the red-gold color of the brick on her house… and then painted out some of the existing rectangles on the garage door to create a mid century modern geometric design. The colors she chose are Caribbean Coral and Harvest Gold. It is amazing what a little paint can do to add retro appeal to an otherwise plain garage door. Kudos to you MidCenturyThriftyGal — on a job well done — and thanks for allowing us to share this photo of your freshly-painted garage door.
Also check out this six-page catalog (page shown above) that we featured in 2010 — it shows lots of ways to add wood trim to great terrific mid century modern garage door styles.
Our double garage doors (on a 1959 ranch) on a white garage have a row of recessed panels on top, then a row of windows, then two larger sets of recessed panels under the windows. We painted the door trim around the panels white, then all the recessed panels the same color as our shutters, which happens to be Benjamin Moore Jamestown Gray. It’s really a blue with a little gray in it. We have neighbors stopping to comment on how nice it looks.
Well, that’s one of the reasons my DH and I moved from a condominium association to a private retro house. Inside, our house was all individualized (we redid the kitchen, replaced every bit of woodwork, bath fixtures, flooring, windows, etc.), but outside–well, when people came home drunk, they were likely to stumble into someone else’s house and fall asleep on their sofa 🙂 When we first lived there, you could paint your front door any color you liked, then a stricter association board gave you a choice of three bland colors (cream, beige, or darker beige) that matched the siding. One of the things I like about the tract houses of the late 1940s and 1950s (Levittowns in NY, NJ, and PA, for example) is that they looked all the same at the beginning, but then people added onto them, painted them, and gave them their individual stamps.
Wow! Another Wolf Pack person! I got my BA there in ’97. And yes, Reno does have a lot of nice mid century neighborhoods. The Plumb Lane/Reno High area has some stunners while the Keystone area is a nice mid century working class neighborhood. The areas around Wells Avenue and Veteran’s Memorial are starting to show some MCM pride too.
The board and management of my HOA are obnoxious. I’d like to paint my garage door just to piss them off. but then I’d get a fine & a lawsuit, so I guess not. One time, i put a half-circle of pavers around some evergreens on my corner, and I got a letter from the attorney!!!!!
love love love what you did! i have to tell you that when we were about to paint our garage door i kept showing our painter the “crawford” sampler…and we kept driving around a large spanse of houses in our area, and didn’t find ONE garage painted with such joy. (we had seen many in an area of upstate NY where we rented several years ago… ellenville NY especially)…. anyway, we wound up painting our garage the same color as the house, a wonderful slate grey…but my heart sings when i see MCTG’s door! good for you (and your lucky neighbors)!!!
Thank you Siri ! It was a bit of a leap, as my Hubby was a little skeptical. But we love the results. We ended up painting our front door Caribbean Coral also 🙂
i would LOVE to see a photo of your garage… is there any way you can post it? i’m trying to picture it, but can’t quite. pam… is it ok to ask?
Hi, Siri. I have taken photos and when my techie DH gets home, I will have him put them on a file from which I can send them. I think I will send them to Pam so she can post them, as I don’t know how to do it here.
Hi, Siri,
I have taken photos of the garage doors and will send them to Pam as soon as my techie DH gets home. Then she can post them here or not. Not sure how to post photos here directly.
Actually, if you look at the Crawford sample colors, the second row, second from the left looks very similar, except that there are two doors and the windows take up a whole row instead of two panels. 🙂 M.E.
thank you so much for that suggestion, mary elizabeth. sometimes i don’t know how to connect what i’m looking at with verbal descriptions. (probably why i flunked gym!) very helpful to steer me back to crawford.
this is a great thread, all.
Wow! I am so glad I saw this. I am planning on painting my garage soon. I was going to go plain white. I have to say I hadn’t even considered any color at all!
Now I have new paint to buy!
I like the mid 20th century garage doors. We have a Crawford Door in our house. Still good after around 60 years. In my area (Westchester County, New York) there are areas where there were a lot of Crawford doors. Unfortunately, many have disappeared in the last 20 years including a couple of Crawford doors that had an interesting window configuration. Thankfully there are still enough of them remaining so that people who know better might try to keep those doors. They were probably one of the best garage doors ever made.
I like the idea, but I do not think my HOA will allow it.
Garage sales are definitely banned.