This week, I’ve decided to share what we’ve done with our doors: Painting Doors Tips & Tricks! Since we’ve been working on the second floor, those are the only doors we have finished but they are the bulk of the doors in the house. We wanted to make a really big change in this house and paint is the best way to do that. So what color did we choose? Black!
Here’s how the conversation went with pretty much everyone I told about my choice (including my husband). “Black???” “Yes, black!” “But…why???” (making faces) “Can you just trust me?” “Um…” “Ok, just look at these pictures! Gray walls, warm, rustic floors, white trim and BLACK doors!” “OH! How nice!” While I can see how everything will look in my head, I’m surrounded by people that just need to SEE what I mean.
Ok, so back to it. I went around the second floor and took all of the doors off their hinges. I had plastic quart bags and plastic cups for the hinges and screws. Same with the knobs. We have this great unfinished bonus room at the end of the hall so we carried all of the doors in there and lined them up.
I inspected all the doors and found that the previous occupants were not too kind to some of them. So I took a random orbital sander and tried to get the doors in as good condition as I could. One set of closet doors were quite obviously painted purple AND pink sometime in their past! Crazy!
One of my favorite tools I’ve been using in the renovations is the Wagner Control Spray Max (disclosure: that’s an affiliate link) which was an amazing deal at $109 on Amazon. I’ve used it for all of the trim, the doors, and plan to use it for our furniture builds. It really makes quick work of all paint jobs and is pretty easy to clean. The finished product is pretty darn close to perfect.
Check your doors for imperfections like holes, cracks, dried drips from previous paint jobs, etc. Repair and sand and make sure to clean the door before you start painting.
Take a paint stirrer or other wood scraps and nail one to the top of the door. You can use this to keep the door off the wall or surface you are leaning the door against to make it easier to paint. In our case, we wanted to be as efficient as possible and had an unfinished room with open joists, so we could actually attach the stick to a ceiling joist and have the doors lined up, standing straight so I could access and paint both sides at once.
If using a sprayer, have the proper safety gear. The filters on my mask were nearly black after I was finished painting!
Have good lighting available. I had horrible lighting in that room and missed many spots in my first round of painting. In the end, I went back twice more to ensure the doors were completely covered.
Again, sprayer users, KEEP MOVING. It’s important to keep the sprayer going to avoid too much paint in one spot resulting in drips.
For some of the doors, like my sons’ rooms, I decided to keep the inside white. So I purchased 24 hour paint tape to protect the newly painted white sides while I painted the other side of the door black.
For painting screws (Yup, we did!), stick them into styrofoam bowls to make it easy to keep them all together, nice and organized.
I will update this post with the absolutely final pics with the walls finished and knobs back on. But here are our master bedroom doors all nice, painted and reinstalled!
What do you think? Have you ever painted your doors? Considered it? What color would you pick?