Now that you know about the ins and outs of our front door restoration, it’s probably about time, that you get to see the result. If you remember, this is what the door looked like when we moved in:

We had always wanted to replace the missing stained glass, but it is something that we knew would be really expensive to do, and considering the state of the rest of the house, it seemed like too much of a luxury. But, after what seemed like weeks of stripping, sanding and painting it seemed a shame not to be able to completely finish the job.

So, after some deliberation, I decided to get some quotes for the work. Luckily our neighbours still have the original stained glass in their door, so that we knew exactly what the missing panel would have looked like. I sent an email with some pictures to a few local companies to get an idea of the costs and you will never guess what happened next…

One of the stained glass companies called the next day and told me, that they have our original stained glass panel in storage! I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. As you can imagine, I was rather confused until the guy told me, that the people who lived here before us had damaged the stained glass, and he had come to remove the panel and repair it. In the meantime, the house was sold (to us) and he had just kept hold of the panel. He had completely forgotten about it, untill he received my email.

So, just a few days later (and normally it would take weeks to have a new panel made) he came round replaced some of the broken stained glass in the windows around the door that looked like this…

…and now look like this

and replaced the stained glass panel in the door.

You wouldn’t know it wasn’t the original glass that had always been there!

We are really happy with the result. Even if it cost quite a lot of money, it’s great to be able to tick something of the long list of things we have to do.