Spring Is the Prime Time to Paint Your Front Door—Here Are the Paint Colors to Watch This Season, According to the Pros
Make your home the most eye-catching on the block with a fresh paint job this spring.
With each spring comes a certain number of housekeeping and home maintenance projects—think some old-fashioned spring cleaning, a closet makeover, or a fresh coat of exterior paint. Spring’s sunnier, warmer weather makes it a great time to tackle these indoor and outdoor tasks, but it can be fickle, so the larger projects may need to wait a few more weeks. Fortunately, figuring out how to paint a front door is a relatively quick, easy home improvement project that you can do almost as soon as winter ends.
“We do a lot of front doors in the spring,” says Kevin Busch, the vice president of operations for home improvement services company Mr. Handyman, a Neighborly company. “That’s the time where the weather allows for it, and it’s a great way to quickly make sort of a statement on your house, because the front door is often the main accent piece.”
If you dream of a total overhaul on your exterior paint colors but the weather (or your budget) doesn’t quite allow for it, a new front door color—either applied by you or a hired pro—is the next best thing.
“The door is the focal point,” says Tina Nokes, who owns Neighborly company Five Star Painting Loudoun. Nokes suggests an unexpected front door paint color to really make that focal point pop: black. “The thing we’ve been seeing for the last several years is black,” she says. “Black shutters, black doors, when you never saw that maybe 10 years ago. I expect black to continue to be really big.”
Black front doors and shutters, especially on painted exterior brick homes, has been on the rise of late. Nokes says most people go with a semi-gloss paint, but there’s an even more striking way to try the trend.
“I’m seeing people doing a high-gloss on their door,” she says. “It gives it a little more pop, because it catches the light with that high gloss. And it looks really pretty.”
Going dark, when the popular trend for front door paint colors is to take on bright, vibrant hues, can feel like a risky decision, but it may be just the thing to help your home’s curb appeal stand out. (Painting a few interior doors black first could serve as a trial run.)
If you can’t quite bring yourself to pick up a can of glossy black paint (such as Blackest by Clare), Nokes is a fan of high-impact peacock blues or sea salt shades. (Look to Silken Peacock by Sherwin-Williams or Hidden Sea Glass by Behr for swatches.) For something between black and Nokes’s more colorful suggestions, she likes Hale Navy by Benjamin Moore.
And nothing beats a good red. “I just love red front doors. I think those are really pretty,” Nokes says. Try Real Red by Sherwin-Williams, and yours will be forever known as the house with the red front door.
