I saw Debbie Travis do this once on her original TV series, painting a metal door to match its wood frame. She didn't use a graining tool, just four or five colors of paint and an ordinary brush, with a satin varnish at the end. From what I've seen elsewhere, this is feasible if you're imitating a fine-grained wood, not if you want the effect of, say, oak. The key, she said, is to look closely at some wood you want to match, and identify all the separate colors in it, then apply the paint in those proportions. The colors that there is the least of would be applied with a nearly dry brush.

Yep, sadly we're sure about the veneer--the messier history of this door is that 5-6 years back, I got it in my head that I should strip our woodwork (because it is gorgeous stained oak and elm underneath, finished in shellac so easy to do the initial stripping). But it turned out to be a much bigger project than I bargained for--the bottom layers were lead paint, and over the years chunks of the trim had been patched and painted over, etc., so it was far from pristine. I stripped the door interior at that point, thinking it would match the outside. Turns out to be a douglas fir door that they had applied an oak veneer to the outside of, which I learned was common in our area as a cost saving measure. The interior fir is pretty imperfect, but possibly it's worth exploring what professional stripping would entail--my DIY approach was not effective with it (got some of the paint off but some was pretty embedded) so I think we'd need to remove it and do a full strip somewhere, but even then I'm not sure how high quality the finished wood would be. (I did explore, at one point, applying a veneer to the interior too, which is apparently a possibility, so I could reopen that.) To complicate it, though, I've since repainted everything I tried to strip, so not sure if that makes it harder to re-strip at this stage...

The light from the chandelier only looks gold in photos. I corrected it a bit after I uploaded it but if I took all the gold tones away until the light looked white, that made the walls look green. I had to keep some of the gold cast to retain a more accurate wall and door color. The door IS a warm white, do you think going even warmer would help? WouldnÂt that make it too close too the wall color? Or would that be a good thing?

Would do either brick or stone over the foundation only and siding above that. Use only one kind of material in the gables -- perhaps horizontal siding the rather than vertical. Would not put any hip roof on any part of the house. Stay with gables and steep slopes with straight edges at the bottom of the slopes all around for your gutter. Would change the roof to have one and only one ridge line height -- the higher height -- and decrease the number of gables to be one facing the left end of your home, one facing right end of your home and one facing the end of the angle of the garage -- not over where the garage doors are now shown . Would not cut corners in the cost to cut corners and create angles in the garage. Would keep the walls leading from the home to the outer left edge of the garage straight all the way to the end and would seriously consider putting two garage doors the same size in that angled end of the garage even if that means adding and additional few feet to the garage length -- definitely would not pour the front yard in concrete for a driveway. Extend the width of the forward facing gable over the front entry to cover both the front entry and those two larger longer/taller windows to the right of it. Extend the depth of the forward facing gable to cover a porch at least 6' deep. Where you currently have windows in the upstairs in gables, the slopes of which will take away room from your upstairs rooms, add dormers there rather than full gables enabling you to have more/larger windows and more room / headroom in the upstairs rooms. There are different kinds of dormers with different shaped roofs. https://www.google.com/search?q=dormers&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiHsdacuJPlAhVJmuAKHZ9AB4sQ_AUIESgB&biw=1328&bih=617#spf=1570770556130