Steel Door Looks Tutorial

[jammiman]

Man Cave Steel Doors

I use my garage doors leading into the house about 50 times a day and they would always get dirty because my hands would be covered with grease or dust or oil as I passed through. That plus all the dirty hands from the kids meant that the white doors always looked like ****. This has bugged me for years, then I came up with the idea of covering the doors with a rusted or aged metal so the handprints and grease marks would be less obvious. This is strictly for looks, as no real functionality or strength is added here – im an artist by trade and I can’t help but want to make things look good.
I looked at some aged tin roofing and old sheets of steel but all the options I found were either too expensive or too heavy and hard to work with. I have some galvanized steel garbage cans in our kitchen for trash/recycle and I saw a blog post some time ago about how to age/patina the surface of galvanized steel so I figured I’d give it a try.

At home depot they had a 20” x 50’ roll of the stuff in the roofing section for $46. I have four doors in my garage, the first door I did was the main door leading into the house which was 32” wide, the other three are all 36” wide. The 20” roll is perfect because it gives me the flexibility to overlap the sheets and do both size doors with one size roll. I also bought an aluminum strip to cover the seam and a box of sheet metal screws to fasten the metal to the door.
The look I wanted to go for was like a prison door – heavily aged metal with a riveted/panel look. Something that looks like it could handle a battering ram. The drawing below is my photoshop mockup for what I wanted the general appearance to be.

I got a bottle of zep acidic toilet bowl cleaner to do the aging.

I have muratic acid for the pool and it would work well, but the zep seemed a safer option to try before I went nuts with the strong stuff. I cut the sheets with tin snips to the correct height, then sanded the surface of the metal with a 60 grit sandpaper. I did this by hand, not with an orbital or belt sander, I didn’t want it to have any kind of pattern in it and this gave me the best results. You sand the metal to remove the galvanized coating in certain areas and expose the bare metal. Next I sprayed down a light dusting of some old cans of paint I had left over – gold and hammered bronze. With the gold I went lightly over the middle in bands and the dark bronze color I used mostly fading out to the edges. Once I had the paint down (a very light coat mind you – barely visible) I sprayed the acid on with a plastic spray bottle. I did not coat the entire surface, I tried to clump it up in a random pattern like rust would do. The acid ate through the paint and into the metal in some of the areas which added to the beauty.

I let that sit overnight then rinsed it off with a hose and repeated the process on the second day. It took two passes to achieve the look I was going for.

Once I had the look I was going for it was time to screw it down. I made some mistakes here on this first one. I should have put some kind of construction adhesive on the door then applied the metal. Secondly, I should have started in the middle and worked my way up, down then left to right. I started in the corners and worked my way in – that mistake mixed with no adhesive gave me ripples in the surface. They are minor, but they still bug me. I used the sheet metal screws every 6 inches across the board and cut the hole for the knob and lock with a hole saw. I rolled the top edge of the door, but found that was a good deal of work that wasn’t necessary, it was just as easy to slide the rounded edge of a breaker bar back and forth over the edge once it was on the door. This flattened all raised edges nicely against the mated surface.

I still have a bunch of doors to do, but I am really happy with the way this one came out. Hope this helps some of you with your builds!