Turquoise Front Door: The B Side

If you are not a child of the 80s who remembers buying cassette tapes with a hit single on one side and a random song from the album on the other (the "B" side), this title makes no sense to you.

If you have not already, you need to join Pinterest. It's basically an online bulletin board where you "pin" pictures of things that you like or inspire you or items from websites you want to buy, and it keeps it all organized by your "boards." I have board for projects I want to do, stuff for the boys, Christmas decorations, Christmas gift ideas to give others, rooms I love, upgrades I want to make to my house, food I want to cook and stuff I want my husband and my mama to buy me for Christmas. If you click on that little "P" icon over on the right under each of our names, you can see what we are "pinterested" in.

I love blogs almost as much as I love Pinterest. My favorites are the ones where common, untrained people like me work on their houses and then tell you what they did and how they did it. Two of my favorites are Young House Love and Bower Power. They happen to be best friends who came up with an idea over the summer to do a non-affiliated "Pinterest Challenge," where they would complete a DIY project they liked on Pinterest and then blog about it. They invite people with blogs to also do a "pinned" project and link to it on their site. I was planning to do this project anyway, so I just time it for this past weekend so I could put it up on the Pinterest Challenge.

The simplest explanation for why I keep slapping paint on everything I can think of and find the energy to complete is because we are not currently budgeted for the two main things I want to do to my house: built-ins in the liviing room and adding cabinetry in the kitchen. I do keep convincing Corey to not only entertain but assist with these little projects of mine, and he's always pleased with the results. Recently, we painted our front door turquoise, which has gotten quite a pleasant reaction, because it's bold and suprising, and I revealed it in this post, but, here's a photo to remind you:

Then I kept looking around Pinterest and home magazines and those decorators kept telling me not to ignore color on the doors INSIDE your house. This led me to the conclusion that the inside of my back door needed to be painted as well. And the obvious color was Navy. See? Look how dull it is in this picture of the house readied for Landen's First Communion party, painted the same color as the walls with white trim:

This is very sad for me because I have since been forced to get rid of this couch.

This weekend, the weather was lovely and the boys were in Beaumont, so we reserved our Sunday afternoon to do a bit of painting. Corey taped up the windows and the top and right trim, thinking we would have the door cracked open to paint the left side of the door. We ended up taping the left trim after I ran the paint brush up and down it, screamed like an injured walrus and washed it off quickly with Pine Sol.

Corey also sanded the door with a fine grit sandpaper. We did not use primer because we were painting dark over light, but we should have used a rougher sandpaper to make sure we could get all the sheen off the old paint so the new paint would stick. This would be a lesson learned during Coat Two. But "thin and even coats" is the tedious and correct way to go, so after one coat, we had this:

While Coat One was drying, I took the hardware outside to strip and paint it. Ultimately I am going to paint all the hardware in the house (instead of paying $12 per door to replace with eighteen doors). So it's a commitment to paint the hardware on this door, because the rest of the hardware will soon follow. They did not have the Cobalt Mist I used on the front of the door, so I went with the similar-but-more-brown and very trendy oil-rubbed bronze. Step 1 is to clean the hardware with something that does not leave a residue. I use watered-down Pine Sol. Step 2 is rubbing the entire thing with a deglosser, because you cannot sand it. Step 3 is sticking them into a paper plate, or that's MY step because I spray paint my entire arm if there is no shield. Step 4 is applying a primer. I use a spray auto primer, because it is meant to go on metal.

The paper plate allows you to pick it up and turn it so you can spray in all the angles you need. I find that spray paint needs to cure, cure, CURE for a very long time between coats - up to two hours. It may be the sub-tropical weather I paint in. I just do not add coats of paint until the previous coat is no longer sticky. I ended up doing three thin coats of oil-rubbed-bronze spray paint, which I did not photograph again until the hardware went back on the door.

After about an hour, Coat Two was ready to go on the door. Coat Two actually redistributed the paint from Coat One, which was followed by another injured walrus yell and then a hearty Lucy Ricardo wail/whine which ended with resolution to let TWO HOURS go between Coats Two and Three, to make sure the paint was bonded and would not removed under the brush strokes of wet paint.

Okay, I'll back up and let you see the full door after the second coat.

This puts us at 6:30 PM applying the third coat to the entire door. Then at 8:30 PM we put another coat just around the windows, which is the area that really needed the stern rubbing with coarse sandpaper. If I had used primer, we still would have put three thin and even coats on the whole door, so the fourth coat of paint around the one area did not end up being more work. Before we went to bed, we put the hardware back on and closed the door.

Monday morning we admired our blue door (Laura Ashley's Navy matched to Valspar Latex Interior Semi-Gloss) and removed all the tape. My husband and children always sound surprised to me when a project I devised is finished and looks tremendous, and I really feel that constantly having to declare that you are really good at something chips away at your credibility. But I insist that I have a vision for this house, and my vision will never be wrong. It's again a bold statement in the room, but there's enough navy in the rugs and porcelain and lamps that it does not look out of place here. Plus it's a great interruption to these too-neutral beige walls.

I did not get a picture of the door before Corey put the plastic back on it. If you are wondering what those little silver dots are or why the bottom of the door is shinier than the top, it's because there is a piece of thick plastic mounted to the bottom of the door so that the dog does not scratch and ruin the door. I had a friend who put this on the outside of her back door, (but her huge dog still destroyed it.) Little Murphy scratches at the door when he has to potty, or he sees us coming up the driveway, or someone or something walks/runs/bikes in front of our house.

Here's a close-up of the knob and lock with the very cured oil-rubbed bronze spray paint.

This concludes a very long post about my completion of the non-affiliated Pinterest Fall Challenge. Thanks Sherry and Katie for opening the field for all of us who tinker with our houses as a hobby (because we have not yet figured out how to get paid for it) to contribute to your blogging event! If you did not get here from their pages, please make sure you go check out what Sherry and Katie and Ana and Erin, the professionals, completed for their Pinterest Challenge, and check out what all the other bloggers contributed.