With picking a maroon-colored metal roof and gray stain for our cabin, one would think I had already decided on the exterior door color for our cabin and that this job would have long been done by the time we had finished the inside work, right?!

Wrong.

Our exterior doors arrived in a light cream color. We were so eager to have lockable cabin doors that we didn’t paint them in the beginning. In fact the cream color almost became the color of the doors. I was beginning to think that the dark colors I had chosen for the outside were getting too dark and the cream color actually worked with the other exterior colors to my astonishment.

Even my daughter talked about how nice the existing color was and wondered if we needed to keep them a light color. Then reality happened.

With all of the traffic through these doors to work on inside projects, we had managed to put dirt all over these poor doors. I thought they would clean easily with some good old-fashioned elbow grease and cleaner, but I was wrong. I either lightened the existing color (and it was in patches!) or the dirt remained.