The Panic Room

The spare bathroom did not disappoint when it came to the list of items for updating.

1) I call it the panic room because there was no color to it. Cream walls, cream tile, white cabinet and countertop.  I'm usually one for neutrals, but this was too neutral even for me! We lucked out on the tile color though. Several houses built during this time had colorful tile that can be difficult to update around. (You know, the avocado, light blue, pepto-pink, etc. ) Mostly the bathroom needed a good scrub, fresh paint, and a couple fixtures. 

2) There was no overhead light in the bathroom. Only a fan in the ceiling. We learned this while we were painting the room one night. 

3) The toilet was old and had to go. Enough said. (Excuse Lucy in the picture.) 

4) The tiled soap, toilet paper, toothbrush, and towel holders had to be removed. This was Stephen's job. He was great at removing each with minimal wall damage and then patching each hole with drywall and mud. 

5) Then we painted! Sea Salt by Sherwin Williams is the perfect bathroom color. It's amazing what paint can do! 

This is not a complete room transformation. We still plan to remove the cabinet and add granite countertops. I'll update this original post when it's complete. 

Painted Doors

I decided to paint and update our interior doors.  My husband thought I was nuts and just making up things for us to do.  I, on the other hand, knew that I couldn't live one more day with plain, white, shiny doors. And so, another project began:

In our home we have the standard 6 panel doors. There WAS absolutely nothing special about them. I fixed that!

This is from our hallway remodel, but you can see what they looked like before. We had brass knobs and hinges throughout the house. I mistakenly thought that painting the interior doors and changing hardware would be a 'cheap and easy' fix. Boy, was I wrong!!  It was time consuming and expensive. Once you change the hardware on one door, you have to change every other door in the house. We had two additional closet doors as well as two bathroom doors to change hardware on; these  doors would not be painted the accent color like the 6 facing the hallway. They were painted the trim color. 

We decided to use dark room by Sherwin Williams. (We had the color matched at Home Depot and used Bher paint.) An interior decorator in the family helped with the selection. I can assure you that I never would have picked the color on my own.  I'm not that good...yet! 

As you can see, the color has a brownish-purple hue.

I researched how to paint 6 panel doors and my personal opinion is a combination of several other blogs I consulted. 

Steps I took:

1) Take the door off the hinges. (This makes the painting much easier!)

2) Remove all hardware. (For us, we had to do this anyway, but it makes the paint job seamless.)

3) Brush paint the trim of the six panels. 

4) Then use a small roller for the rest of the door. Roller each panel, next roller the center vertical sections, move to horizontal sections, and finally the two putter vertical sections. You'll be able to see the 'wood' texture of the door to help you with each step. 

This is the side view of the hallway door. I wrapped the paint on all sides. 

All door backs are the same color as the trim.

We also painted the bi-fold closet doors and updated the knobs. I found these cute silver ones at World Market for $3.99 each. A small price to pay for an updated look! 

Before and After bi-fold door knobs

My thoughts after this project: 
It was very time consuming and not as cost effective as I had hoped, but I'm definitely happy with the updated look.  

On to the next project!