Front Doors & Wreaths!

It's no secret that I LOVE to make wreaths. I've made COUNTLESS Christmas wreaths (I have one that matches each of my Christmas trees), Spring, Mardi Gras and Halloween wreaths for my own doors and wreaths for several friends and relatives at their request or as gifts. I don't know why, but it's just something I've had a lot of fun doing over the years. Here is a sampling of some of my best work:

Since we signed our purchase agreement in April however, I've been hesitant to embark on any new wreath making adventures, since I didn't know if we would have two front doors or one. As I alluded to in an earlier post, we had a lot of door drama with the house. The standard front door (singular) is fine, but it seemed like the overwhelming majority of our neighbors had opted for the very expensive mahogany door upgrade. In addition to being expensive, the mahogany doors are reportedly a nightmare to maintain, as they require bi-annual upkeep by a professional. Lastly, and most important to us, the standard door only comes in a single door set-up (i.e. it isn't available in double doors).

For those reasons, we didn't really want to go down the mahogany route, but we really, REALLY wanted double doors, which as far as we understood, were only available in the mahogany. I wanted them because I had invested lots of time + money into making two of each wreath for the past four years (our house in Texas had double doors). Ross wanted them because he didn't want to have to disassemble and then re-assemble all of our bulky furniture to get it into the house on move-in day. Both of these reasons are kinda dumb, but long story short: the double doors were a double must-have.

The great news came on Design Studio signing day (aka the last day to make the door decision without a change fee) when our fabulous design consultant Yosra informed us that Toll had just picked up an additional line of doors (Masonite)! Yay! She showed us the catalog, and although I'm not obsessed with them or anything, they look better than the standard door and, most importantly, ARE DOUBLE DOORS! As is the case with all upgrades through Toll, they came at a cost, but the price was about half of what we would have paid for the mahogany doors (which aren't much prettier in my opinion than the Masonite doors). Here's a (terrible iPhone) photo of our doors, the only difference is that ours will be stained much darker:

This is a close replica of the standard door (free):

This is one of the upgraded mahogany doors we didn't get ($4,500):

Last but not least, now that we've made the dreaded door decision, I can commence wreath making! Since my mom and I were both in need of good fall wreaths, I went up to their lake house last weekend to make it happen! I needed pine cones, but my parents' house is on 10 very wooded acres in the country - so that wasn't a problem. Mom and I gathered the pine cones, then we painted and glittered them, then I attached each one to the wreaths! It took the entire day but it was so nice to get back into my crafting element AND to be able to do it with my mom! Here are some pictures of the process and the final product!