Goodbye Builder-Grade Doors - DIYers Have A New Favorite Way To Upgrade Them
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Doors serve their purpose well, but functionality doesn't have to equal plainness. Except, builders don't seem to have gotten the message in that regard. In the United States, homes are built to be as plain as possible, with neutral walls, white trim, and boring doors. If you want style and personality in a home, you must add it yourself, and while many homeowners feel comfortable painting walls and adding custom built-in storage solutions, they often leave the doors untouched.
It's time to beautify your builder-grade doors, transforming them from boring to a stained-glass marvel that will leave your walls and floors splashed with color. Stained-glass might seem unapproachable, especially if you've never handled a soldering iron before, but don't worry — this stained-glass project involves no copper, flux, or soldering. Rather than using traditional stained-glass methods, this stained-glass door DIY is built upon the bones of an existing glass door. By covering the clear or frosted glass with colored glass pieces, you can create a door that catches light like stained glass without the learning curve of traditional practices.
What you'll need (and how to prepare it)
Glass doors are commonly found as pantry or office doors, but even if your house did not already come with one, you can find an interior door with a glass window at stores like Home Depot. Since the stained glass will be covering the original glass, the door's existing glass can be clear or frosted, but clear glass will produce a more light-catching result. To create the stained-glass effect, you'll of course need colored glass sheets, which you can purchase at your local hobby store or online. Before you add them to your physical or digital cart, you should calculate the amount of glass you need to cover the window and calculate the permissible load of the original glass. Dulles Glass and Mirror offers an online calculator you can use if you're unsure of how to approach those calculations.
In addition to all things glass, you'll need a few tools. If you've never worked with glass before, you should wear a pair of rubberized gloves to keep your fingers from getting nicked. Always wear safety goggles when working with any material that could potentially snap up into your eyes, even if you've worked with glass before. To cut and handle the glass, you'll need a pencil grip glass cutter, which scores the glass, grozing pliers, which hold the glass, and breaking pliers, which function as the name implies. These tools could eventually pay for themselves, because adding stained glass to your home might increase its value.
Creating art with stained glass
Before cutting glass, you'll want to wet your glass cutter with a lubricant like WD40. Then, score it with the glass cutter in your desired pattern and break that off from the main piece with the breaking pliers. Simple, geometric shapes that involve straight lines, like squares, rectangles, and triangles, will be the easiest for beginner glass artists, since they lower the risk of breaking the glass outside of the scoring line.
@tovagoldart Replying to @🍋🍋Heather🐝🐝 I had this video, so I just created a new voiceover teaching you exactly how I did it if you have specific questions, I'm happy to answer. I kind of made it up as I went along... SStainedGlassGGlassArtMMosaicMMosaicMosaicArtistCCraftyUUpCycleKKitchenRenovationMaximalism
After you've cut your glass into your desired shapes, lay out the pattern on the outside of the door, sticking down each piece with a clear glue like Weldbond Multi-Surface Adhesive Glue. Make sure the glue covers the entirety of the bottom of the piece of glass and that you cover the spaces between the tiles with a wash of your glue and water to create an impermeable seal. Once all your colored glass is glued to the door's original glass surface, fill in the gaps between the glass pieces with grout. You have many color options for the grout, but to achieve a finish like real stained glass, you should use a dark gray grout. Wipe away excess grout as you would with tile and let it dry. To match your new door, you can invite natural light and elegance into your home with stained glass transom windows.