Painting the Doors and Changing out the Knobs and Switchplates

We are getting closer and closer to being finished with Phase One of the Kitchen/Family Room makeover! Pretty much all of the big projects are done now so I just have a few minor things left like installing two more light fixtures, sewing my roman shade for the window over the sink, finishing painting the rolling island cart and possibly recovering our ottoman (I am definitely planning on recovering it but if I haven't found the right fabric by the time I finish up those other things I will just photograph the room with the ottoman as is.) I can't wait to show you all. It's starting to really feel like home - well, at least in this room! And Lillie and Lola's room is really starting to come together too now that it's painted and the wallpaper is up - I can't wait to show you that as soon as I finish a few more minor projects in there!

For today I wanted to show you how we've been painting all of the trim and the door, as well as an inexpensive way to update your old brass doorknobs and switchplates.

We had five sets of these doors downstairs and then we've got a whole bunch of larger double doors upstairs for the closets, and then of course we have all of the regular sized doors going into each bedroom and bathroom. They pretty much all look like this - a dark wood, with brass doorknobs.

We are doing the doors room by room. So far we've done three sets of these smaller double doors downstairs along with a set of french doors (which my mother-in-law did for us which I am so grateful for - all those window dividers would have done me in!) and then one large set of double doors in Lillie and Lola's bedroom as well as their main bedroom door.

The first thing we did is remove the doorknobs. Because we have learned that if you are continually turning a handle that you spray painted over and over and over the paint will wear off we went ahead and replaced the handles completely and bought real oil rubbed bronze doorknobs for all of the doors that we use on a regular basis (for instance in the kitchen we bought real oil rubbed bronze ones for the pantry doors as well as the french doors because we open and close those a million times a day). For doors we don't open and close all that often we decided to save money and spray paint them. While I had the spray paint out I also went ahead and removed all of the various colored switchplates they had in the kitchen/family room and decided to spray paint those as well. The mix of brass, yellow, and off-white was driving me insane!

Here is the white we used for the switchplates. We used the same brand but in the Oil Rubbed Bronze finish for the doorknobs. We purchased the spray paint at Lowe's.

Here you can see some of the brass and yellowed with age switchplates.

Yay - so much better now that they are uniform! I have to say I was really really pleased with the overall look of these. I have used similar paint before that didn't turn out nearly as well!

Once that was done we started priming the doors. We used Zinsser Bull's Eye 1-2-3 Primer. I used a brush to get in all of the more detailed areas then rolled on with a small foam roller all of the flat areas.

Then we used two coats of Benjamin Moore's London Fog and added the doorknobs back on! The color looks off in this photo - London Fog is a light to medium gray and it looks kind of tan in this picture. =( This is the only room where the trim and doors are London Fog. I really wanted to do gray kitchen cabinets and I thought this would be the best way to make them work in this room because it is an open concept and it would have been hard to decide where to end the gray trim and switch to white. However, in the whole rest of the house we are painting the trim in Simply White and the doors Wrought Iron. It is finished now in Lillie and Lola's room and I can't believe how much more bright and airy their room feels. I cannot wait to do it in the rest of the house. Because I am doing it myself, though, it's a LONG and SLOW process. As soon as I get caught up on my computer work I am starting on the dining room. I cant' wait! And then the entry way and powder room!

(Sorry the color looks off in these photos) =(

Here are the knobs before we sprayed them:

And here they are after we spray-prainted them.

Over on the other side of this room we used real oil rubbed bronze on these two doors. The set on the left is the pantry and and the set on the right goes into the dining room. I plan on changing the hinges too at some point but I've got a million other projects ahead of that on my list so it will probably be quite a while before I get to that.

(The color of the gray trim looks more accurate in the bottom half of this photo)

I also wanted to let you know we our Give Thanks pillow covers are back in stock! And we will have some Give Thanks placemats coming very soon - hopefully later this week. They are ready, I just need to photograph them.