I shared with y’all a couple of days ago that I had a crazy idea for our exterior bedroom door. Originally, there was a window here, but during our bedroom remodel, I had the window replaced with a door. And while I love the look of the door inside our bedroom, I’ve really disliked how this exterior of the door looked. Because it’s in a section of our house that has the Austin stone facade, and this section happens to be the most unlevel section of our old house, adding a door here was a bit of a challenge. They had to cut through the stone to add the door framing and then figure out how to trim it out on the outside.
I worked with them at the time to figure out the best solution, and this was the best we could come up with. I thought I could make do with it. I had convinced myself that I’d be satisfied with it once it was all painted. But the more I looked at it, the more I hated it.
It has Hardie board trim that’s kind of even with the stone facade, and that Hardie board trim wraps around the door jamb and meets the PVC trim that came on the prehung door. But one major issue is that we couldn’t put trim above the door to match. So the whole thing just looked awkward to me.
That door was installed eleven months ago, and I’ve been trying to figure out a solution ever since then. But since then, I did a very big concrete project on our front porch using concrete to create a faux stone facade for the porch skirting area to match the stone on the rest of our house.
I learned a lot during that project and gained some confident in working with concrete, so that gave me an idea for this door. I decided to remove the Hardie board trim and replace it with faux concrete stones. But I decided to try a completely different process for this than the one I used on the porch skirting. On the porch skirting, I created textured silicone mats from existing stones on our house, built a mold for each textured pad, and then poured each concrete stone separately. Then I attached those faux stones to the porch using mortar. For this project, I decided to apply the concrete directly to the area and then shape and form the wet concrete to look like stones.
I started by removing the Hardie board trim from the left side of the door just to see what I was working with. I expected to see the 2×4’s that had been used to frame the door, but I had forgotten that they had used 1/2-inch plywood on the door frame to build that area out a bit for the Hardie board to sit closer to the front of the stones.
Rather than remove those, I decided to keep them there, but I had a lot of gaps to fill and a lot of waterproofing to do before I could get to the fun part of this project. I used Great Stuff expanding foam to fill in the gaps.
I let it expand and cure for a few hours…
…and then I trimmed off the excess with a sharp serrated kitchen knife.
And then I went back over those areas, as well as the nail holes and any tiny cracks, with caulk.
When the caulk was dry, I did one more waterproofing step. I used my Semco liquid membrane…
And I brushed that onto the whole area, making sure that the wood, the remaining Hardie trim on the jamb, and all of the caulked areas were fully coated.
I did that extra step not only for waterproofing but also because I didn’t want to put concrete on any porous surface that would suck up the moisture from the concrete as it was curing. So this waterproofing membrane helped to keep the water in the concrete during the curing process rather than being wicked out into dry wood.
Next, I decided on my pattern for the faux stones. I wanted some of the new faux stones to be a continuation of the original stones, while I wanted others to be separate, individual stones. In other words, I didn’t want the finished door to look like I had just added a series of five-inch stones around the door. So I decided which original stones I wanted to continue around the door, and I used my handheld grinder to grind about two inches of the face of those stones so that I could get down to bare stone. The stone on our house is painted, and I couldn’t add concrete on top of paint. So I needed to expose the bare stone to give it some “tooth” so that the new concrete would adhere to it.
You can tell by the color which ones I ground down with my handheld grinder. The paint on our house is gray, so these off-white areas are the areas that I ground down.
Next, I needed to attach some galvanized diamond mesh lath over the areas where I wanted to put the concrete. Without this, there was no chance that the concrete would hold. I found this in the concrete section of my local Home Depot. It comes in a 27″ x 96″ piece, so I had to use my tin snips to cut off the size I needed, which was 7″ x 89.5″.
And then I used 2″ exterior screws to screw the lath onto the area. I made sure to completely cover all of the wood and the Hardie trim, wrapping it around to meet the PVC trim on the prehung door.
After getting that lath on the whole area, I went back and added more screws in any areas where it wasn’t lying flat against the wood. If it looked like it was bowing out or had any give to it, I added a screw.
With the lath on, I was finally ready to mix some concrete. I used Rapid Set Cement All for this project, which is the same thing I used to pour the faux stones for the front porch. I really like Cement All because it uses a really fine sand as the aggregate, so it can be feathered out to a really fine edge, which was important for creating the stones. But I used it for my scratch coat as well. Using a 6″ x 2″ trowel, I covered the lath with the concrete, making sure that I pushed the concrete into the lath really well. I wasn’t concerned about how this scratch coat looked. In fact, the rougher, the better. The roughness gives the next coat (i.e., the faux stones) something to grab onto.
Here’s a closer look at that scratch coat. You can see that before I added the concrete, I put painters tape on the white PVC door trim to protect it from the concrete and to give myself a clear visual of where my “stones” needed to stop.
Once that scratch coat had dried for about 30 minutes (again, I was using Rapid Set, which sets up very quickly), I was ready to start creating the stones. I started at the bottom and worked my way up. I did this because I really had no idea what I was doing and I was fairly certain that I’d need to do a few stones before I felt comfortable with the process. So if I messed up on the first couple of stones, those could eventually be hidden behind some pretty planters. 😀 And sure enough, my first “stone” looked ridiculous. All I could see was some sort of smiling Jabba the Hutt face looking back at me. But because the concrete sets up so fast, there was no getting rid of that face. (I did go back with my grinder and reshape it later.) The second “stone” was better, but still not great. Again, I waited too long to try to texture it, and by then (literally within ten minutes), it was too hard to get it just right.
By the third stone, I was getting my process and technique down much better. I’ll still go back and fix some of the weird parts with my grinder before painting these faux stones, though.
Because the prep work too so long, that’s as far as I got on the stones. But I got far enough to see that my plan is definitely going to work.
Here’s what it looked like this morning. All of it is dry, but you can see that parts of it (the thinnest parts) dried much darker than the rest. That’s because it’s so thin and it cured much faster than the thick parts. It’s imperative to water cure Rapid Set Cement All as it dries, so I kept my water sprayer close by and kept it very wet for an hour. But those thin, feathered edges still cured really fast. I think it’ll be fine once the concrete is primed and painted so that it can’t get wet from rain.
And while I do want to fix some areas with my grinder now that these are cured, I’m very pleased overall with how this is looking. I think this is going to look so much better than that awkward Hardie trim around the door!
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.