# Five coats of paint read a house's history backwards > Five chipped bands of paint on a front door, dated down the side, make sense read one way — newest colour first, down to the bare wood. August 19, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/paint-layers-on-the-front-door Five bands of paint, chipped back to the layer beneath, stack up the chest over a strip of bare timber. Charcoal at the top, then red, teal, mustard, and deep green nearest the wood. Down the right edge, in charcoal, a year sits beside each band: 2016, 1998, 1984, 1971, 1962. Nobody stripped this door on purpose. Time did, a knock and a decade at once, and left a record that makes sense read one way — from the newest colour at the top down to the bare wood. ## Why print chipped paint instead of a fresh coat? Because the chips are the part of the door actually saying something; a fresh coat hasn't said anything yet. A door painted once, in one colour, records a single decision. A door painted five times, then worn back down through all five, records five separate decisions to keep the same door rather than replace it — a repaint is cheaper than a new door, and somebody chose it again and again across six decades. The wear that exposed the layers wasn't planned by anyone, which is exactly why it reads as evidence rather than as a design. ## Why do the years matter more than the colours? Because a colour by itself just says somebody chose it once; the year turns that choice into a dated event, and five dated events are a timeline in a way five colours alone never are. Anyone could guess a house had been repainted from the colours showing through. The years make it checkable and comparable instead of guessed at — 2016 next to 1998 says exactly how long the top coat lasted, which is a fact about the household, not an impression of one. ## What makes a good version of this print? Committing to the full stack rather than picking a single favourite colour to feature. Five separate flat inks is a real cost against a one-colour print, and it earns that cost here because the subject is the count itself — cut it to two or three colours and the print still looks like paint, but it stops being able to say how many times the door was repainted, which is the whole claim it's making. [A design spread across a similar run of colours](/stories/design-across-seven-colours) earns its ink the same way: the count carries the information. ## Do the years have to be the ones actually on your own door? They should be, because the point is dating one specific door, and an invented year is decoration standing in for a record. Some doors have three coats behind them, some have eight — five isn't a fixed number here, it's how many showed on this one once it was scraped back. Counting the coats on an actual door, even roughly, and lining the years up against them is what separates this from a paint chart. ## What is the bare timber at the bottom doing? It marks where the record runs out — the door before anyone currently in the household has any memory of it. Below the oldest painted band there's nothing further to date, because nobody scraped any deeper and there's nothing under raw wood to find. A family moving into an older house [inherits a door already several decades into its own history](/stories/new-home-housewarming-gift) and dates it from whichever layer happens to be showing, not from the timber underneath, since the earlier coats are already gone. ## How is this different from the wallpaper print behind the wardrobe? That piece is two states of one instant, seen side by side; this one is a single door's whole span of time, stacked in order. [The wallpaper behind a wardrobe](/stories/wallpaper-behind-the-wardrobe) proves how much a surface changed by comparing a faded patch against a hidden rectangle that never faded — one comparison, one moment. This print instead stacks every decision in sequence, which is a record of duration rather than a single before-and-after. ## Does it print well? Yes — five flat colours with hard edges between them is the design, so reducing the ink count changes what the shirt is arguing, not just how it looks. [A pale base such as chalk-white](/stories/pick-a-garment-color) keeps every band reading as distinct against the ground, and the charcoal lettering for the years stays legible well below the size the bands need, since it has four digits to carry rather than a picture. ## How do I get one made? Describe the door at [JustOG](/) — how many coats, which colours, and what years go beside them. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped. Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop). Five colours, five years, and the bare wood at the bottom where the numbers stop.