Faux Crittall Door Makeover
Faux Crittall Door Makeover
If you follow me on Instagram then you will have seen how I transformed my bland UPVC doors in both my kitchen and living room into faux crittall doors, or Frittall doors as I like to call them! Lots of us have UPVC doors and whilst they are practical and obviously cheap to install they aren’t the prettiest and definitely lack any sort of character. Now I’d dearly love to have thrown caution to the wind (and my budget) and replaced them with beautiful crittall doors (or even a similar style wooden variety) But the cost and also the fact that these doors aren’t very old and are in perfect condition stopped me from going down that route.
My UPVC doors before.
So the only solution was to transform them! So for the princely sum of about £50 this is what I did.
So first of what you need -
Bedec Multi surface paint in Satin Black. This also comes in a matt version but I like the slight sheen of this one..
Medium grade sand paper
Sugar soap
Good quality paint brushes such as the detailing one pictured plus I used a few small cheap brushes to get into all the nooks and crannies within the door hinges and internal structure.
Masking tape
Wood strips
Tape measure
Spirit level
Strong glue suitable for glass and use outside, I used Gorilla Glue
First of all you need to prepare the surface of your doors or window that you’re planning to paint. I know this bit is tedious, but necessary or you’ll be looking at a well dodgy looking surface on your doors and we want them to look slick and absolutely nothing like the original UPVC!
I used a sugar soap to give the doors a really good clean to remove all the dirt and grease. Then give every part you’ll paint a light key (that’s a sand) with a medium grade paper.
Then because of the particular paint I used, YOU DON’T NEED TO PRIME!! I Know! How brilliant is that. Seriously the Bedec Multi surface paint is so good, I’ve used it in loads of painting projects and its foolproof.
So now you need to tape off your doors. First tape off the glass and the surrounding walls. I went in to all the nooks and crannies on my doors because they’ll be open a lot (particularly in summer) so I wanted very surface to be black and not just the areas you can see when the doors are closed.
Once that’s all done you can start the fun bit and start to paint. Now to get a really good finish you’ll need at least 3 coats. I did four. When you put the first coat on, don’t get scared! I know, it looks absolutely terrible, but it will get better! Take your time and do thin coats for the best finish.
So painting done, and don’t they look so much better? Of course you don’t need to paint them black, I’ve seen UPVC doors painted a lovely sage green colour that looked fabulous, but I wanted that classic crittall look so stuck to my favourite colour!
So now you’re ready to attach the bars. Of course you can leave them as they are and I guarantee they’ll already be looking better and isn’t it amazing how painting them actually makes them look like painted wood rather than plastic? You would never know now that they are UPVC doors.
For my bars I went for thicker bars than you’d find on a critical style door as the chunkiness of the door frames I think would have made very thin bars look a bit odd. I chose wood strips with 1.5 inches diameter.
So using a tape measure and a spirit level to get them positioned right start cutting your strips. I used three on each door both sides so in total needed 12 wooden strips cut to size. Make sure you paint them with your paint before you attach them with the epoxy glue. And that’s it!
For anyone wondering how they’ve lasted, the paint hasn’t chipped and the wood bars have lasted though the winter. I also painted my back living room doors in the same style but instead of the bars used an industrial strength black tape to create the illusion of bars as my husband didn’t want the wooden bars in there. I’m waiting till he’s forgotten about it to actually put the bars on! But all in all they look great and you’d never know they were UPVC. Such a great result for hardly any money, my favourite kind of DIY!
Theresa x
