It appears that last year’s winter house project has also turned into this year’s winter house project. Last year, we successfully painted the trim in almost our entire house white and changed out 7 interior doors: hollow, scratched up darkish-pine doors, replaced with solid pine 6-panel doors painted white. It took forever. To be honest, the trim was not all that bad – just a lot of taping. We left it on rather than trying to remove it without damaging it. The doors were somewhat of a nightmare.
From my perspective, the main problem was that the doors were not primed, and required a lengthy process of priming one side with oil-based primer, letting it dry, priming the other side, letting it dry, then repeating the process with at least one layer of latex paint, being careful not to let the paint pool up in the creases of the panels. Of course, they also took a lot of time and effort from Tom to be hung. We had replaced three bedroom doors, two bathroom doors and two closet doors. What remained were the pantry door in the kitchen and two sets of bedroom closets. Additionally, we had several decorative ceiling beams which were still the old pine color.
We were able to knock out the pantry door pretty easily, and I had a little bit of trim work in that corner of the kitchen to finish up. The door from the kitchen to the garage, we realized, was an off-white color that really clashed with the newly white trim. So, I ended up painting over that, as well. In the end, I think it really helped spruce up the kitchen!
For the bedroom closets, we decided on a bit of a different approach from the existing doors. Both upstairs bedrooms had two double closets with bi-fold doors – that’s four closet doors per room! Instead of going with white bi-fold doors, we opted for French doors. We had painted the first set of doors over the summer, and this winter Tom set in on installing them in the guest room. I’m not sure what he had to do, but he somehow refashioned the same pre-hung doors we got for the rest of the house into French doors. It took a lot of work, and a lot of time measuring and re-measuring. But the end result was stunning.
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| This is what the closets looked like in both upstairs bedrooms... |
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| And here are the new closet doors installed in the guest room! |
And, finally, I decided to tackle the ceiling beams in the downstairs family room. While the dark wood beams didn’t clash, the color drew in your attention and were a sort of “distraction” from the rest of the room. I decided to paint the same color white as the trim, which is slightly different from the ceiling white. It took a fair amount of time to do, but I only needed two coats and was able to knock it out in a Saturday afternoon. I’m pleased with the way it turned out. The white helps bring brightness to the room so it doesn’t feel so cavernous, being that it’s the “daylight” level and half underground.
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| Here's how the family room looked before we moved in... |
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| And view #2, though you can barely see the one ceiling beam... |
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| And here it is with everything painted. |
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| Now, if we could just get rid of that track lighting... |
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| And a view toward the movie wall :) |
What’s left to do now is primarily our own bedroom closet doors. It will be a chore, but it will look so nice. The only other question is whether or not to paint the ceiling beam on our main floor, along the cathedral ceiling peak. It’s so high, it kind of scares me… In the meantime, we’ve been enjoying the progress we’ve made and the freshness and brightness it’s added to our house.
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