This week, one by one, I have been painting the doors in the house. I’ve completed most of the doors downstairs now but will probably have to do a second coat tomorrow on the living room door…which means tomorrow I get to start tackling the doors upstairs and the two wooden walls should we have enough paint…and I don’t go crazy 🙂
All the doors and frames were painted a shade which I can only refer to as vanilla yellow. It’s not the worst color ever (our leather couch is almost exactly the same color in fact) but it just stands out far too much from the white walls and distracts you from the general beauty of the house itself. It doesn’t help that the doors are older than dirt and not in the best of shape, either. So all the bumps and bruises stand out even more with this old paint…but it is still better than the dark brown that they were apparently painted at some point. Yikes!
It would seem that I really did not like the original color of the doors because I started going through old photos so I could give you some before and after examples…but it would seem I don’t really have any!
At any rate, here was the bathroom door before paint. This color is the same color that all the doors in the house are painted.
And you can see the color a bit better here which is in our staircase leading from the ground floor to the first level. As I said, not the worst color but just a bit too strong in my opinion. I’d rather find a nice yummy color for the walls than have the doors be the focal point.
This was the color of the doors from inside the bathroom. There is a second one beside it and we actually left the back of the door this color just so we can look at it from time to time and remember just how far this bathroom has come in the last year.
Now here’s the finished product from outside the bathroom…
And from the inside. No more green! I still have a bit of cleaning up to do around the edges but at least the paint is on the door which was a big part of the hurdle 😉
Here’s the finished front door. I can’t believe I don’t have a before photo but the color was almost exactly the same as the doorbell box to the left of the door. A vast change and an excellent improvement!
And finally the door to the living room which I gave a first coat to today. You can tell the color a bit better in this photo it seems…just a barely off white color with a hint of gray and pink perhaps? But that’s really more noticeable in the dark…during the day it’s nearly white.
Amazingly enough the new color we selected is very similar to the color of the windows…which thankfully were not painted vanilla. At some point they will have to be repainted also.
A word of advice to anyone who decides to paint the doors in their house: the paint you should buy is a very thick lacquer and it generally continues to run and spread a bit after you’ve applied it. We’ve found that the best way to get a good finish is to use a brush on the trim, corners and any details on the door and then use a small roller to complete the rest of the door. If you paint with the brush first and follow with the roller, you are also likely to see a few places where the paint is starting to drip and collect so you can even everything out as you finish off the door.
I also highly recommend wearing disposable latex gloves to keep the stuff off your hands because it is nearly impossible to get off without paint thinner. As a matter of fact, we may have to take paint thinner to our dog (if I wasn’t terrified that she will lick it) because she’s got paint all over her side after leaning in a door frame two days ago. There’s a lot more wet paint around here today so I am really hoping she manages to avoid the front doors for the next few hours. The stuff seems to stay tacky for days which is really not helping the situation either 🙂
Happy painting!
