My latest project has been
my daughter’s new room. This room has served multi functions as a guest room, a
home office room, and as a storage and catchall room. To effectively make this
my daughter’s room, I had to find other organized storage spaces in the house (but
that is a discussion for another blog post). The room is a work in progress and
I will share projects as I go along but today I wanted to show one in the room that
I completed recently.
This project was to update and freshen the look of the heavy sliding closet doors. And of course to not have it look like the ‘before’ in the new room. Here's what it looked like before:
This project was to update and freshen the look of the heavy sliding closet doors. And of course to not have it look like the ‘before’ in the new room. Here's what it looked like before:
After |
The color on the walls in
the room is ‘cool pool’ by Valspar. This room gets a lot of natural
light through a large window and so the brightness of the color is not
overwhelming. I had a bit of internal debate in choosing the color for the closet doors…my
choices ranging from white to a contrasting yellow to purple. I finally settled
on a color two shades lighter called ‘lazy days’ taken from the same palette as
the wall color. I chose a satin finish but a semi-gloss would be good too.
The sliding doors are heavy but
probably with a hollow core and around 40 years old…the finish on it looked as
old too. I began with a thorough sanding and cleaning with a tacky cloth….. I cannot
stress enough the importance of sanding in any repainting project. Not only
does sanding give a clean raw state to begin work on but also ensures that the
paint or technique further used will adhere well, allow a cleaner painting job,
and last longer without peeling or chipping. So spend a little extra time
sanding and prepping your surfaces before beginning a painting project. An
alternative would be to use an appropriate primer before the painting project. This
is an acceptable shortcut but remember that you are adding on more layers on
top of the existing ones.
Now onto the fun stuff…
I painted the doors with the
chosen color using a foam roller brush. I did take the doors off the hinges and
laid them flat on a work bench to make painting all the edges easier. The doors
seemed to soak up the paint just as quickly as I could put it on. It took me
four coats to get an even paint finish. I let the doors dry a good 48 hours
before I hung them back in the room. I did the decorative painting of the birds
on the tree branch free hand but there are many stencils available that can be
used too. I referenced google images for ideas and patterns. To ensure I liked
the way the birds on the branch looked, I drew the entire picture in a faint
outline with a pencil and these lines were easy to erase after. I used acrylic
paint for this decorative painting part. I love working with acrylic paint…it
goes on smooth, mistakes are easy enough to fix, and a wide variety of colors
are available.
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