April 5, 2013 / JustinKays Porter

The Final Step: Door Decor

In the process of painting our trim to match our baseboard, we knew we were also signing up to do something with the doors. The question was: what?

Ugly boring doors (pardon the blue tape!)

We had toyed around with the idea of going all out and buying new doors. But we decided that wasn’t really our style (or our budget!). We also thought about just painting the doors to match the trim and baseboard and saving up some time and money to do a big door project later. Apparently, we decided that wasn’t really our style either! Oh no. We decided that our style was to not spend much money, do it all right now, and make them look like new doors.

How, you might ask? The ever-clever Nancy gave us an idea. She had seen videos of people gluing and/or nailing pieces of trim onto a boring door and painting everything the same color, to give the illusion of a more architecturally interesting door. This may not be best way to explain it, but you’ll see. At the end of the project, the doors look like they have some decorative moulding around the outside. A little flare for not much money!

When we went to pick up our quarter round, we also picked up some 1-inch trim for our doors. Back at home, Justin cut and glued/ nailed the trim onto the doors while I sanded and stained the quarter round. Then I followed behind Justin and caulked between all of the trim and the doors, once the glue had dried. This makes the door and the trim look like one piece, an not like trim stuck on a door!

This took the better part of a day (to the point that we worked until 10 pm and then were too tired to cook… good thing Round Table is close!). The next day, while Justin quarter-rounded our house, I went to work on the doors. The doors are probably the only thing in the house that haven’t had a thorough washing since we moved in, and this was the perfect opportunity. So I washed, dried, and sanded down any rough spots on the doors, then considered them ready for paint. Enter: the fabulous paint sprayer!

I spray painted those doors until I had cramps in my hands and forearms. Literally. And then I painted them again! And because the paint sprayer is rather loud, I listened to some awesome music and had a little dance party by myself. Justin found this quite entertaining. At least I can make him laugh!

The moral of the door story is this: you can make ugly boring doors into cool fancy doors with a little trim, a little paint, and a little time. Don’t they look great?

We decided to go with one piece of trim in a rectangular shape around the door (and our built in hallway cupboards, seen below). While doing our research for this project, we had seen people turn their boring doors into two panel doors, three panel doors, six panel doors; just about every configuration you can imagine. But we liked the clean simple look that we chose, and we knew it could be completed in a weekend. Other designs would have been a lot more labor-intensive!

So this project and this post wraps up what started as the baseboard project. Almost… When we got our spiffed up doors back in the house, we couldn’t bear the thought of putting the hideous brass door knobs back on. So we splurged, and bought new doorknobs.

Totally worth it. And that officially wraps up the baseboard/quarter round/trim painting/door renovations/door hardware project. Whew! We are so happy with the final outcome, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t happy this project is complete.