Video: Helpful Hints for Painting Your Front Door

MILLBRAE — Host, Sarah Rutan: Painting your front door may seem like a simple task, but the security risks involved can complicate matters. Today we’re in Millbrae with Diamond Certified Expert Contributor Dean Knecht of Dean Knecht Painting to learn some helpful tips.

Diamond Certified Expert Contributor, Dean Knecht: Here is my tip of the day for a homeowner when painting the front door on your house. Back in the ’50s and ’60s, they had metal interlocking weather systems, and they’ve come a long way over the years with the vinyl weather stripping now. But either case, this system still works.

When you paint your front door, you always need to have a little bit of drying time, and the paint usually dries in about two hours, the latex paints. You can touch it and it’s still not wet, so you figure that it’s okay to close the doors.

But when one of the biggest problems you have is when you close your door, right where the hinge side is, it puts a lot of pressure at this end. So, what’ll happen is latex paint stays very sticky even though it’s dry to touch, and when you close the door, it forms an adhesion. So, the next morning, you open the door, and you say, “Why did my paint pull?” And that’s because it still wasn’t cured all the way through while it was closed.

So, to help remedy that problem, everyone probably has in their medicine cabinet a bottle of Vaseline. And what you do is you grab the Vaseline, take it out on your finger, and you rub it along the whole edge of the weather stripping, or in the case in the ’50s and ’60s, the metal interlocking system, you rub it on the wood. So, what that happens is the Vaseline forms a lubrication there so when you close the door, it’ll stop it from adhering to the surface that it’s touching, and then it won’t peel like that when you open it up in the morning.

Host, Sarah Rutan: To learn more from local, top rated companies, visit our Diamond Certified Expert Reports at experts.diamondcertified.org.