Tutorials | Hicks House

Yup you read that right, when we stained the deck, we also stained some sections of the house… oops. Sometimes despite the best preparation (we used plastic sheeting and tape to tape off the sections we thought would over spray) mistakes happen.

We obviously could not leave it like this. As its become summer we’re spending more and more time and eating more and more dinners out here and this was always taunting us:
I asked several handy people how to get it off and the general answer was “It’s stain – the whole purpose of it is to NOT come off.” Well that’s just peachy. Some suggestions were to try acetone, or mineral oil.

Ken tried the mineral oil and after several minutes of severe scrubbing he got the splatters into more of a light brown smear. Wah Wah – not good enough.

There had to be better way. Then he found this stuff (affiliate link) Motsenbocker’s Lift-Off – No. 4 Spray Paint Graffiti Remover, 22 oz. Trigger Spray
:

So we picked up some scrubbers and a handled dish brush from the dollar store and Ken donned some gloves and tried again. The bottle said not to leave it on the applied area for too long because it can oxidize and strip the color UNDER what you were trying to remove so don’t spray too big an area at once. Ken sprayed it down with the Liftoff and went over it with the scrubber.

For extra stubborn areas he used the plastic scrubber.

He didn’t even to press down or scrub that hard it just started coming off… almost like magic.

In order to wash it off after the scrubbing to ensure that it didn’t strip through our siding he then sprayed it down with Windex and wiped it off with a clean rag.

We were both in awe of how amazingly it worked. Not that I would recommend getting stain on your house but if it does happen at least there is a way to easily get it off.

So what do you think? Are you as impressed as we were? I’d love to hear about your DIY oopsies.

The 1980’s called and they want their door knobs back. One of the quickest and easiest changes we’ve made to update our house is the door hardware. The house came with cheap builder grade brass door hardware.

I honestly don’t understand why they even still make hardware in this horrendous color, I’m pretty sure that no one besides the builders buys it anymore. After replacing all of the hardware in the condo we were bummed to be looking at polished brass again.

This time around we wavered on what exactly to replace them with. Should we stick with traditional knobs, or switch to lever handles? Buy new, spray paint the ones we already had? What color – brushed nickel or oil rubbed bronze? The endless decisions put this project on hold for a bit as we wavered back and forth with what we wanted. I’ve seen a lot of oil rubbed bronze across the blogosphere but also seen painted black doors which I love. Although we’re still unsure if we would want to ever paint our doors black, oil rubbed bronze hardware would rule it out – too much black.

We eventually settled on lever handles in brushed nickel. They would match the rest of the hardware throughout the house while still being “different”

Changing it out only took Ken about 15 minutes per door. First he unscrewed the hinges one at a time.

Then replace with a new hinge one at a time so you never have to actually take the door down and it should still line up properly with the routered out hinge holes.

We also added these little “stops” to the top hinge on the doors that would come close to hitting a wall.

We found these hinge packs at home depot, that were WAY cheaper than individually buying hinges however the brushed nickel seemed to be constantly out of stock. Another delay.