Tutorials | Hicks House

What color to paint the front door? It’s such a big decision it sends the first impression that visitors and passerby’s see of your home. It was such a big decision in fact that when the builder offered to paint the door for us before we closed we couldn’t come to a decision. I even went so far as to PhotoShop different colors onto a picture of the house to help us decide. In the end we decided to live with the house for a while and just had him paint it white.

white house with a white door – how ordinarily boring

close up

After several months we finally came to the consensus that we wanted yellow. It’s such a happy color, how can you come home to a yellow door and not become instantly more upbeat? Now the only question was what kind of yellow?

This was our inspiration that I found our Pinterest. We both loved it. It’s from Beautiful MattersBlog

Inspiration Door

So we went to the paint store and looked at all the options of paint swatches and came to a decision. I was slightly worried it may be on the bright side, but hey it’s only paint and the whole point is to get the door to “POP” right?

So I got to work cleaning the door with some mineral oil to get off any dirt and grime that was on it. (I read this is extremely important in order for the paint to adhere properly.) It turned out to be a LOT dirtier than I could have imagined.

look how dirty!

Then I got ready to start painting – shook up the can to mix the paint properly and popped it open…

the first sign this might not go so well…

It looked awfully bright, but hey the inspo door is bright and you can’t always tell by what the color looks like in the can right? After all there is way more of it concentrated in a small little area and it always looks different once its dry. So I got to painting. Here’s the finished product:

close up

far away

My eyes! MY EYES!!! We couldn’t have possibly picked a color this bright! the swatch must have lied to us…

oh but we did pick it

What were we thinking? I’ll tell you what I’m thinking now, I’m thinking I need a re-do. As its now the end of October and its getting too cold outside in New England I may have to wait until spring. It’s possibly it may grow on me in the next couple of months – stranger things have happened.

The bright yellow on bright white is just too much – the inspiration door is bright yellow on gray which helps tone it down… Rookie mistake! We should have known better!

So what do you think is it too bright or just right? I’d love to hear your opinion!

Back in June we spray painted our vent covers in the condo to match the baseboard trim. This was my first introduction to spray painting and I immediately had ideas swirling in my head.

When Ken bought the condo the previous owner had left an old solid wood mid-century modern dresser in the attic. We never thought much of it and used it to store Christmas decorations and things. However after we sprayed the vent covers and they came out looking all shiny and brand new I got the idea to spray paint that old dresser. We thought it would be the perfect addition to the guest room

I unfortunately didn’t get a photo of it with all the drawers in before we started as we took it apart to move it but here it is without the drawers.

wood dresser no drawers

Here’s a close up of the doors

Aren’t those gigantic wooden knobs gross? That’s part of the “re-style” of this dresser as well. The first step was to remove the knobs then clean all the surfaces with mineral oil to get rid of any dust or anything that was on it. (Who knows how long it was in that attic)

cleaning the drawers

Then we created the “paint studio” out in the middle of the yard to ensure we didn’t get stray paint on anything. We tarped a large section, held it down with bricks then tarped over a moving dolly that we put the dresser on. The purpose of this was so that we could easily spin the dresser so as not to spray directly into the wind. I apparently missed that memo as I was in the zone and ended up covered in blown back paint. C’est la vie.

“paint room”

side after coat one

front after coat one

I did two full coats of the entire dresser and the drawers. The drawers came out less than ideal as I sprayed them with the can facing down to the ground instead of level and some of my back spray from painting into the wind left little dimples on one side of the dresser. Also, something I hadn’t counted on was that the white paint would highlight all of the dings and scratches that were all over the old dresser. However, for my first time I think it came out pretty good and is worthy of its current spot in the guest room.