Faux Wood Doors

After visiting what might be every blog post, Pinterest pin, and YouTube video on creating a wood-look using gel stain I came up with what I think looks pretty freaking good! I have seen many faux wood attempts on garage doors but they typically looked washed out, clearly faux, stripy, or flat out ugly. This Type-A girl can't handle that.

This project was another one of those "if you give a mouse a cookie" situations. We stained our fence, which led to redoing our garden beds, which led to redoing our hanging baskets, which led to patio lighting, which led to painting the house, which led to garage and front doors, then exterior lighting, the flag pole, the house numbers...

For this project, I wanted to update our aluminum garage doors and wooden front door to better fit in with the modern farmhouse aesthetic I was going for. Well, as much as is possible in a '90s subdivision. Unbeknownst to me, garage doors are expensive and wooden garage doors are really expensive. I knew entry doors were pricey but I still looked with no luck. After all the other recent updates, we needed to do this on a major budget or not at all so buying new doors was out of the question. Adding a magnetic cover was considered but apparently doesn't exist past a Kickstarter. Covering in a thin wood layer was a thought but would make the doors too heavy to operate. After earning my PhD in gel staining for a wood effect I came up with these base ideas and went from there. Yellow base, more than one layer of stain, graining tool, chip brush. The yellow base color is necessary to pull natural undertones you see in real wood. I saw one tutorial where a caramel-orange color was used but then they just dry brushed stain over it. I liked the way the colors worked together but the wood grain effect was missing. I saw numerous posts where 2+ layers of one stain color were used to get a richer color and cover. Again, good but the final result was not realistic or interesting to me. We wanted to avoid the Mona Lisa effect- nice from afar but less beautiful as you get closer. I was set on a base of yellow paint, then moved on to stain colors. I wanted a cedar-like color, not overly orange and not too dark. I knew to get depth and interest I would need to use more than one color. I made a list of the most commonly used brands and colors of gel stain for similar projects. Minwax and Old Masters were the most common brands and since we were getting our house paint from a store that carries Old Masters we went with them. One less stop in COVID madness made sense. Old Masters website was also helpful because it showed how the gel stain looked on different types of wood and even fiberglass. I used the fiberglass samples for reference since it was closer to metal than wood. I settled on Cedar and Early American. My plan was to paint yellow, dry brush Cedar, wood grain Early American and admire my work!

I decided to practice on our side exterior garage door. Our 2 year old decided he would add his own flair, too. It needs to be replaced eventually and it's not visible to anyone so if it turned out hideous I could slap some paint on it and call it a day. I wanted to get the technique of using the wood graining tool down and how to best layer the stain before doing the front and garage doors. This was a good idea because after experimenting with a few different orders of stain colors and number of layers I settled on yellow base paint, Early American brushed on, Cedar brushed on and then wood-grained, then another layer of Early American. Each layer must dry for a full 24 hours or you will ruin the lower layer. I read cautions of this and still had to try for myself. Once the layer is not tacky at all then you can do your next layer. I did one layer per day. As much as I wanted to get it done it was not possible to cut corners on the timing of this. Full disclosure, we had our house professionally painted. Even though I was convinced we could do it ourselves my husband said no to standing on tall ladders and scaffolding (buzzkill!). Included in the cost of painting our house was the front and garage doors. I asked about the wood effect with gel stain and the company said they'd never done it before. So I asked them to paint the doors yellow so I could follow through and stain them. He looked at me like I was crazy, same way when I said I wanted my downspouts black too. The painters did use a fine mist sprayer to paint the garage doors and they rolled the front door; they could have rolled the garage doors but this was faster. I feel completely silly about our front door. It is solid wood but I painted it so I could stain it to look like wood. Here's the deal, I detest stripping paint and sanding any surface that isn't flat. This door had at least 3 layers of thick paint and is likely original to our house. I wasn't willing to buy a new door and I wasn't willing to strip and sand, so paint and stain it was. For the base color, I picked Dandelion Wine. It looks like butter. I was intimidated to go bright yellow or orangey so I figured I would be safe with a soft yellow. Our neighbors thought we were crazy with our yellow doors. Numerous people would stop and try to politely ask if we were done and some even directly asked if it was a mistake! It was shocking to pull into our neighborhood and see these striking yellow doors.

After the base of yellow paint, I started with the stain. Using a cheap chip brush was ideal since you don't want uniform crisp coverage. The first layer of stain was Early American. I put a normal amount of stain on as if I was doing a primer layer, not too thick but not dry brushed. On this layer, I painted the flat portions first, then the insets. In order to start my wood effect, I painted in the "direction of the wood" creating seams where horizontal and vertical sections intersect. I did not try to avoid brush stroke marks. Then on the insets, I created a diagonal "seam" in the corners. I did this just by turning the brush at an angle and painting. I saw one tutorial where someone taped all these off into hexagon boxes. He got crisp seams but it looked like way more work than I wanted to do, I didn't want to risk peeling up the base coat of paint, and I was convinced I could get the same effect free handing. Plus he did not layer colors or use a wood graining tool. I was kind of careful with this step but not precise because I knew I still had 2 layers to go and that wood grain is not consistent.

After 24 hours, I moved to the second layer of stain using Cedar. This is the layer that gets the wood grain effect. Again, I used my cheap chip brush and brushed on a layer. This layer is thinner than the first. As soon as I painted a section I followed through with the wood graining tool. The wood graining tool is very easy to use and the learning curve was quick. I am glad I practiced this on the side door first but it is not difficult. I alternated where I rocked and rolled the tool to keep it interesting and not a continual repeating pattern. Every now and then I did need to brush off the tool because the gel stain builds up and about half way through the large garage door I actually washed the tool off with mineral spirits because it was really gummy. I only used the wood graining tool on the center squares and the vertical and horizontal flat panels. For the angled insets (the ones I painted with the brush diagonal), I brushed it on then used an old ribbed tank top to lightly wipe it down. I didn't intentionally use a ribbed tank top, it just happened to be on the top of the rag pile but the ribbing helped to create a little bit of a graining effect. I also tried to get the seam effect by getting diagonal at the intersections of the corners. This layer took the longest. It took five hours to do the front door, a single car garage door, and a double car garage door. When this layer is done I got super excited! It looks really good and real and I was tempted to stop here. In fact, I freaked out with each layer and considered stopping at each layer but I am very happy I went with my gut and did all four layers.

Again, I waited for 24 hours and then started my third layer using Early American. This layer is the icing on the cake. It warms it all up, smooths out any harshness and completes the depth of the look. Again, I used my chip brush. This layer went on the fastest because by this time I had a rhythm down, there's less stain on this layer, and it's not as precise as the others. This layer is more of a dry brush than a thick coat of stain. I followed the same order of staining centers, inserts, and panels. I also kept up working in the same sections and creating the seams. After this step is done, you can step back and have all the heart eyes because it will LOOK. SO. GOOD! It was after this step that even more neighbors stopped by and were amazed at what they saw. They said if they hadn't process they would have thought it was real. And all were happy that we never intended to have yellow doors! We even had a neighbor we never met come to our door and ask me to do hers....for free!

Gel stain takes a while to completely dry but does start to set kind of fast, especially if it's warm so working in sections is key. If it is not fully dry the new layer wipes up the previous layer and creates a messy look. I'm in California and it was HOT (honestly probably too hot) when I did this project so I would head out at 6am to do my painting each day. I did my garage door one horizontal section at a time, and did each square one at a time, then did the short vertical panels in between, then did the long horizontal panels last. You want to make "seams" where the panels intersect but you also need to get long continuous strokes for the long panels so there are no random visible stop and starts from the brush.

We are currently building out the supporting post on the patio cover for our front door to tie it all in. We're wrapping it in wood and will be using the same paint and staining method to match the color. We've cut, wrapped, and pulled off the wood twice so far. I also went back and brushed some black paint onto the handle of the single car garage door.

I have a poly coat that I plan to put on all the doors but I wanted to let them fully cure and I want to avoid anymore painting in the hot California heat so I will wait until the fall. We probably don't even need it as our doors do not get direct sunlight but I do want to protect all the time and effort I put into this. This project was actually easy but it is time-consuming. I say it is 100% worth it though as the supplies and time are thousands of dollars cheaper than replacing the doors and the outcome is phenomenal. My plan B was to paint all the doors black if the staining effect failed.

Supplies: Chip brushes 3" and 2", four of each

Rubber wood graining tool (used the large one only) Rag (old ribbed tank!) Old Masters Gel Stain Early American, Quart and 1/2 pint Old Masters Gel Stain Cedar, Quart Kelly Moore Exterior Paint Flat, Dandelion Wine, Quart

Mineral Spirits

Bucket for cleaning tools Good playlist ;)