I added a new step to my project that wasn’t in the original plan: painting. Gotta improvise sometimes.

With the old plywood doors removed and the new door and frame installed, the shed was looking much classier. But that part of the project required framing the new door properly, filling in new gaps with plywood, and caulking between the plywood sheets to seal it up. Basically, this left a bit of a mess, as you can see above.

In addition, the new door frame was just bare wood, without any paint or stain to cover and protect it. This would need to be painted not just for cosmetic reasons, but for longer term protection.

As for the rest of the shed, a new coat of paint will always clean things up. Besides, it had been a few years and was probably due for a new coat anyway. With nearly constant rainfall in the Seattle area all year round, exterior surfaces really take a beating from the weather.

The most difficult part of this phase wasn’t the painting at all – that was simple enough, and fun. It was trying to come as close as possible to matching the exact shade of blue here. To be fair, it didn’t need to match precisely, especially if I were going to re-paint the entire shed anyway. But our house was painted with the same color blue as well, and ideally the shed should continue to match the house.

So after half a dozen trips back and forth to Home Depot and a ridiculous number of paint chips, I was finally able to match the color. Much to my surprise, it’s not blue at all, but actually called “Sheffield Gray,” at least according to the paint’s official label.

The white paint for the door frame/ trim was a lot easier, and it didn’t matter quite as much whether it matched. I’m actually still torn about this color even after painting the frame because the house uses more of a gray color for the trim around all of the doors and windows. But hey, white looks nice too.

As mentioned above, the painting work itself is straightforward and actually fairly enjoyable. The exterior of the shed is not a particularly large surface area, and it’s not difficult to reach any area, so I didn’t even need a ladder or any tools other than a simple brush (and a screwdriver to pry open the paint can lid, and a hammer to shut it again).

If only the entire shed-to-workshop transformation project were this easy.