Moving into the Guest Bedroom

We know we’re totally late on the whole Thanksgiving weekends update, but better late than never. We decided to have a low key, low pressure Thanksgiving. That’s code for “We were too lazy to cook a turkey.” We roasted a chicken instead. And the rest of our meal was made from stuff we had lying around the house.

Squash, mashed potatoes, green beans and roast chicken. And ice cream for dessert. Not bad for a very-last-minute feast. We even roasted a dog-friendly version of our meal for Jabba:

I tried to grab a picture of it but by the time I ran back with my camera, she’d already scarfed it down. I caught Smokey mid-scarf:

Canned cat food of the filet minon variety. He horked it down in a matter of seconds. Side note: we can’t wait to rip up that fugly linoleum. We’ve tried everything — even bleach — and it still looks dirty.

We decided to take Thanksgiving day completely off. The rest of our four-day weekend was spent wrapping up the guest bedroom. We gave the French doors a coat of polyurethane, removed the plastic film from the windows, and installed the custom door handles. Then we gave the trim 2 coats of black paint to match the floors and doors. After that, it was just a matter of vacuuming, mopping and moving in.

Here’s how the doors looked before:

And after:

View from the hallway:

We love how much light the hallway gets through the guest bedroom windows. And we’re still smitten with our DIY door handles. We were worried that the black-on-black would look flat, but the pop of texture really helps add some dimension to the doors:

View from the inside looking out into the hallway:

The closet doors are back up:

And, for the first time since April, we have a fully functioning closet:

It feels so luxurious not having to live out of cardboard wardrobe boxes. But even more than that, we’re thrilled to have a closet with doors. Our apartment in Brooklyn didn’t have any closets at all, so we installed an open closet system in the bedroom. Everything was always on display, which made for some awkward times when we had company over. Overflowing hampers happen.

Right now, we have 3 things in the room: a mattress, a rug and a chair. The mattress is on the floor, college student style:

We thought about gussying up the bed. Getting rid of the white duvet that we throw on the bed for extra warmth. Fluffing the pillows. Crisping up the linen. And then we realized, the mattress is on the frikkin’ floor. What’s the point of pretending we’re fancy? We like to keep it real:

We installed a ceiling fan a couple of weekends ago:

We’re not huge fans of fans, but we need a couple in our house. The guest bedroom is directly above the dining room, which is where our wood-burning stove is located. Having ceiling fans in the dining room and the guest bedroom will help circulate heat throughout the house.

As far as looks go, fans usual fall somewhere between bland and revolting. Anything even remotely attractive is way, waaaay out of our price range. So we chose fans that are really simple and plain in hopes that they won’t be too noticeable:

The chair is another piece from Bradley’s company. We snagged 6 of these puppies back in June — two with arm rests and four without. They’ll eventually end up in the dining room.

If you look closely along the bottom edge of the trim behind the chair, you can see that we need some touchup work on the floor paint. Apparently we didn’t get close enough to the wall in this part of the room. We’ll fix that when we paint the floors downstairs.

We also have to do a little touchup on the French doors:

Keepin’ it real.

We picked up a radiator pipe that let us move our tall, skinny radiator a few inches further from the curtain:

We were planning on making boxes for all of the radiators in our house so that they’re not total eyesores. But this one is so close to the window that we might just paint it and leave it exposed.

If we do leave it exposed, we’ll need to touch up some paint on the floor:

The other radiator — the short, wide one we removed — was super heavy and dented the floor a bit. We’ll also need to fix the big, gaping hole that the pipe pokes up from. You can see right down into the dining room through it:

We’re going to find or make some sort of cap to conceal that. And, finally, we’ll need to get a handle for the radiator valve:

It had one but it was so rusted that it broke when we removed the radiator. At the time, we played it off like we had the strength of The Hulk. It’s all fun and games till you realize you can’t find a replacement that’s the right size.

We’ll be back tomorrow with more updates on what we’ve been up to. Stay tuned!

P.S. Thanks for all the kind words about Margot. We’re completely smitten with this special dog, and we’re thrilled to have her join our family. Now if only we could get this potty-training business down…

$50 dresser makeover.

It’s funny how inspiration comes out of nowhere and smacks you in the face. We knew we needed to give our grey dresser a major facelift, but we had no idea what to do with it. Here’s Old Grey hiding under a couple of wicker baskets:

We knew we’d fix it up right when we had the time and felt inspired. A couple of weeks ago, boom, we were inspired:

That’s the 1930s glass knob that lives on our bathroom door. It’s vintage and glamorous and sparkly and chic. In short: it’s a keeper. We thought it would be great to find a mini-version of the same knob to use as drawer pulls. I vaguely remembered seeing some at Anthropologie. And that’s when I remembered this Anthropologie cabinet from a few years ago:

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It’s grey on the outside, but opens up to a bright and cheerful yellow on the inside. I loved the secret pop of color. And just like that, we decided to paint the dresser a crisp white with teal drawers and throw some glass pulls on it.

Now that we had a plan, we started gathering supplies. We scoped out Anthro’s drawer pulls:

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Those bad boys are $8 a pop — not cheap considering we have to buy 10 of them — and they have mixed reviews. If we’re paying $80 for something, it better not be wonky, wobbly or off-color. And then there’s the whole brass thing. Not our style at all. Pass!

Next stop: the cabinet pull section of Home Depot. We found similar pulls for $3 each.

They look and feel just like Anthro’s version, and they’re bronze instead of brass. The catch? They’re acrylic, not glass. Not a big deal to us, since they looked and felt like glass. So we did a happy dance for saving $50 and walked out with 10 pulls. We also picked up a quart of paint for the drawers:

That’s Valspar Monterray Bay Teal in semi-gloss. One quart set us back $15. That’s all we purchased for this project. We had the rest of the supplies on hand: 220-grit sandpaper, wood putty, and half a gallon of the oil-based white paint we used as primer for our guest bedroom doors.

We dragged Old Grey up to the master bedroom (currently our workshop) and got to work. First, the before pictures:

That old thang has been through 2 moves with us. It’s survived being carried up to the top floor of a 3-story walkup, narrow staircase and all.

It’s definitely showing some signs of wear, though. Paint is chipped in some spots.

Hardware is still missing.

The black thingy on the left is actually an IKEA coat rack.

I needed a place to stash my necklaces because they were constantly getting tangled up. So I drilled holes in the side of the dresser and screwed the rack on. It wasn’t the prettiest solution, but this wasn’t the prettiest dresser either. Now that we have more space for storage, we can get rid of the rack and seal up the holes.

Bradley helped me prep the dresser for painting so I could take pictures of the steps involved. We started by taking the old pulls off:

The old pulls need 2 screws to attach to the drawer, but the new pulls only need 1 hole. So we used wood putty to plug up the holes we didn’t need anymore:

We’ll use the hole closer to the middle because it would feel more visually balanced. We also used wood putty to seal up the hole on the inside of the drawer:

Nobody would ever look for a hole on the inside, but we’re thorough like that. After the putty dried, we used our orbital sander to get all the old paint off:

A belt sander would also do the trick. So would a wood block wrapped in sand paper and some good old-fashioned elbow grease. Either way, the goal is to remove as much of the paint as possible and get a nice, smooth surface to roll paint on.

Next up, we wiped down the dresser using a clean rag soaked with paint thinner.

Water would work fine, too. We just happened to have paint thinner on hand so we used it. Here’s our nekkid dresser, ready to be painted:

Bradley moved on to another project and I started painting. When it comes to painting furniture we have a few tips that always give us good results:

• Use an oil-based paint.
  Latex is fine (we used it for the inside of the drawers), but oil is much more durable and long-lasting for furniture that gets frequent use.
• Apply paper-thin coats.
  A lot of people are really skeptical about painting wood because they think it will show brush strokes or have too much of a crafty / shabby-chic look. The trick to getting a smooth, untextured look is not to glob on your paint. We always do 3 (or more!) paper-thin coats instead of 2 very thick coats. Yes, it takes a little more time, but you end up with something that looks way more profesh.
• Sand between coats.
  This is absolutely essential to getting a super smooth finish. It also really helps with durability. Glossy paint doesn’t adhere well to glossy paint. If you don’t sand in between coats, your paint will eventually start flaking off. We use a 220-grit sandpaper or a sanding sponge before every coat. You don’t have to sand very hard — just enough to take the sheen off. Then wipe the dust off and paint the next coat.
• Let it dry completely.
  We’re pretty impatient people, but we’ve trained ourselves to walk away from the paint. We let each coat dry overnight before we went back to sand and paint the next coat. That way the paint has time to cure and harden, and we’re left with a really durable finish.

Just in case you’ve never seen a sanding sponge before, here’s what it looks like:

It’s great for scuffing up surfaces without sanding too much. I used it this on the inside of the drawers and on the curvy parts of the dresser.

Here’s one more look at the before:

And here’s how our dresser looks after a new set of pulls, 3 rounds of sanding and painting, and 24 hours of drying:

Hard to believe it’s the same dresser, right? The crisp white makes it so much more charming.

Then you open a drawer and — BAM! — you get an unexpected pop of color.

We love it!  And we’re still swooning over how the pulls look:

I took the after pictures on a pretty dark and gloomy day which is why they all seem a little dark. We can’t wait to see what the colors look like on a sunny day. And how the dresser looks in a room that isn’t a total disaster zone. Either way, it’s totally charming the crap out of us right now. We’re excited to put it in the guest bedroom and see what our visitors think.

Cost breakdown

• Dresser: $0 (found / reclaimed)
• Pulls: $30 for 10
• White paint: $0 (leftover from another project)
• Teal paint: $15
• Sandpaper: $0 (already had on hand)
• Wood putty: $0 (already had)
• Paint rollers: $5

Grand total: 50 beans. Whee!

In case you’re wondering how we reclaimed this dresser, it’s a case of NYC luck. We found it on the curb outside our loft building in Brooklyn at the end of the month. Leases end, people move, perfectly good furniture gets dumped. That’s when we swoop in and snatch up a piece we think we can work with.

We’re almost ready to move upstairs, folks. That means we have a ton more furniture-related updates coming up soon, including a pretty awesome IKEA upgrade. Stay tuned!

Hooked on spraypaint.

A few days ago, I came across this sweet little Anthropologie hook on Pinterest and I immediately pinned it:

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So adorbs! The Trolley Stop hook retails for $12 a pop. Kinda overpriced for a hook if you ask me, but that’s how Anthro rolls. It totally reminded me of the vintage door hardware we cleaned up for our bathroom door:

It also reminded me of this hideous brass hook we found and saved:

That shiny gold sucker was hanging on the back of the master bedroom door we removed and sealed up. You can almost see it in this way-back-when-we-demolished-the-master-bedroom picture I dug up:

The brass hook isn’t really vintage at all; it says TAIWAN on the back. We’re guessing by the cheesy shiny brass finish that it’s from the ’80s. Bradley voted on tossing it, but for whatever reason — maybe because I’m from the ’80s, too? — I couldn’t toss it in the trash. I tucked it away in a moving box instead and forgot all about it. Until I saw the hook’s better looking sister on Pinterest, that is.

We dug up the hook and took it out to the yard for a little spray paint action. We went with the same flat black that we’re using on all of our vintage hardware. A little tie-everything-together trick that we think will help make it look older than it actually is.

Here’s how the hook looked after 2 coats and an overnight dry:

Equally adorable, and way cheaper. This quickie makeover cost us, maybe, 2 cents worth of spray paint and 5 minutes worth of time. Sorry, Anthro. We win this round.

In case you’re wondering what that beat-up surface behind the hook is, it’s the back of our bathroom door:

Bradley stripped all of the latex paint off, and then sanded it to a smooth finish. We were planning on painting it a crisp white, but we’re pretty smitten with the raw look. You can see 4 different layers of history:

There’s the white paint on top. Then the older cream paint. And a dark greyish stain peeks out from behind that. And finally there’s the raw wood.

The more we looked at it, the more we liked it. But it would also look pretty slick painted white. Then again, the hook and hardware looked really cool against the distressed surface:

We couldn’t decide, so we left it raw for now. We know the remaining paint is lead-based, so if we don’t paint it white, we’ll seal it with a clear coat. We cleaned it up to the point that there’s zero flaking and chipping, but we like to play it safe.

More pictures of the door are coming up in another post where we show you the painted hall. Hint: it looks hot. Stay tuned!

Back to the daily grind(er)

When we last left off with our bathroom door makeover, our hardware and doorknobs were taking a nice, long soak in some paint thinner:

We were initially planning on soaking them for 24 hours, but it ended up being a solid week thanks to the flood evacuation chaos. In the meantime, we went to our local hardware store to pick out some spray paint.

We know a lot of people are totally gaga over oil-rubbed bronze spray paint right now. (Pretty sure Sherry from Young House Love is singlehandedly responsible for that obsession!) ORB spray looks great on YHL’s door hardware, and that’s exactly what we planned on buying when we went to the hardware store.

When we found the spray paint aisle, though, we starting hemming and hawing. The ORB spray suddenly didn’t feel right for us. It seemed too glossy. Or too bronze. Or too traditional. Or not traditional enough. On the one hand, we knew it was tried-and-true. Everyone is doing it, so it works. On the other hand, everyone is doing it…

Maybe it’s because we’re both second-born children and have a constant underlying urge to rebel. A need to zag when everyone zigs. Even when it doesn’t really make sense or much of a difference. We’re not really sure. All we know is that we stood in the spray paint aisle for much longer than any normal person should, and we debated over ORB vs flat black door knobs like it meant the difference between life and death. It. Was. Dramatic. In the end, we walked out with the flat black.

We fished out our hardware and tried to scrape the paint off.

We thought that the extended soak would make the paint melt right off, but it was still hanging on for dear life. Time for Plan B: Bradley put a stiff wire brush attachment on his grinder and handed it to me. And then he told me to be extra careful about where I place my hands because the wire brush could cut my fingers. I handed the grinder back to him.

Now this is a definite case of do as we say and not as we do: if you’re going to use a grinder with a stiff wire brush attachment, you should wear protective gloves. Bradley has been using this tool on an almost-daily basis at work for years now. He told me he never wears gloves because he knows his grinder like the back of his hand. I yelled at him, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t hear me over the noise of the grinder. I’m currently considering supergluing some leather work gloves to his hands while he sleeps.

After about a minute of grinding, here’s what the lock looked like:

We loved the dimpled texture on the face of the lock so much that we almost considered not painting it. (We zigged, we zagged, we zogged.) The only problem with leaving the lock unpainted is that it would definitely rust. We could have use a clear spray paint to seal it up, but we’re not crazy about the shiny clear-coat look. After the lock, Bradley cleaned up the hinges:

These were tricky because there were so many nooks and crannies filled with paint. Bradley cleaned off as much as he could, and then I scraped the hard-to-grind areas out with a pocket knife. Here’s what one cleaned-up hinge looked like with the pin removed:

We also decided to grind and paint the original screws, because it’ll be a pain to find the perfect sized screws for all of our hardware. I found a spare hunk of wood and screwed all of the screws just enough so they held firmly upright:

We only need to clean up the parts we’ll see once the hinges are in place. You can see all of the paint buildup on the screw heads:

And here’s what they looked like after grinding:

I actually faced my fear of the grinder for this part and cleaned up the screws myself. It wasn’t nearly as terrifying as I thought — just very, very loud. After that, I used a knife to clean out the buildup inside each screw head:

It sounds like a lot of work, but it really wasn’t. The grinding and scraping only took about 5 minutes. It actually took longer to set everything up for grinding.

Next, I lined everything up on a cardboard box:

I propped the hinges up so the visible side would be totally covered:

The lock was easy, because there’s only one side you’ll be able to see:

There was also the round piece that goes around the door knob and the cap to the keyhole:

And, finally, there were the porcelain door knobs:

I wasn’t sure how best to mask these puppies, so I went the overkill route. I wrapped up all visible parts of the porcelain, mummy style:

Next step: spray painting. I did 3 light, even coats and let each coat dry for 10 minutes in between. We let the final coat dry overnight, and here’s what they look like now:

We’re really glad we went with flat black and not ORB, because we’re 99% positive that the world would have come to a screeching halt if our hardware was any shinier. No sarcasm there. We’re too uptight and buttoned up for jokes. Laughter is not allowed up in this hizzy.

Up next: we have to finish painting the bathroom door and then we can finally put it back in place. That’s right, folks. We’ve been living without a bathroom door for over a week now. It was funny at first, but then we discovered just how much of our bathroom can be seen from the street. Showering has been kinda awkward ever since.

What we learned from this project:

• We’re idiots for not wearing work gloves.
  I mean, seriously, look how close his fingers are to that wire brush.
• Renovating? Save your cardboard boxes and glass jars!
  Cardboard makes a great surface to paint on. Glass jars are great for soaking brushes and other stuff in paint thinner. Just dump all your stuff in the jar, pour paint thinner over it, pop a lid on that sucker and let it soak as long as you need.
• It’s OK to sweat the small stuff.
  We know our ORB vs flat black dilemma sounds ridiculous because — hello! — it’s only hardware. Who notices hardware? Well, we do. We’ll have to live with this stuff day in and day out for a long time, so we’re pretty determined to make our space just right for us. Sometimes that means spending way too much time at Lowe’s. Sometimes it means biting our nails down to the nubs as we fret over whether we made a mistake painting our doors black. Sometimes it means redoing a project because we couldn’t get it right the first time. It’s all part of owning a space — really making it ours. And we’re OK with that!

Blogging From the Flood Zone and Restoring Our Old Bathroom Door

Holy moly, we just breathed a sigh of relief so loud they probably heard us back in Brooklyn. Our neighbor-friend Jhane (the same one who warned us about the flood) sent us a text while she was walking by our house. Walking. Not swimming. She let us know that our house is still standing and our street is totally dry. Whee! (Thanks again, Jhane!)

We’re still blogging from just outside the flood zone. We’re kinda trapped here because all of the roads around us are closed. Just half a mile away, there are houses covered almost up to their roofs in mucky river water. It’s really scary and sad, and we feel horrible for everyone who lost their homes. We’re really anxious to get back to ours. But in the meantime, we’re going to share another project we started before we had to evacuate.

We’re so close to wrapping up the guest bedroom wing, but there are a ton of loose ends to tie up. Take, for instance, the white door at the end of the hallway:

That’s the door to our bathroom. From far away, it looks great — a standard bright white interior door. And then you get up close and see this:

Jagged edges. Peeling paint. Stains. Pencil marks from where some kid drew on the door and nobody bothered erasing ‘em. They painted over the hardware a few times and it looks pretty crusty.

Still, the old skeleton key lock works and we’re in love with those porcelain knobs. We saw those same knobs at a local antique store going for $30 a pop. We also saw replicas of this exact set going for $70 in a restoration catalog. We’re pretty sure we can restore these puppies for $0 using stuff we have in our garage.

We started by taking the door off its hinges and taking off all the parts we want to save. Everything went into a big glass jar, including all of the screws:

The porcelain knobs went into their own container:

We filled both containers with enough paint thinner to completely cover all the parts:

We did this part outside because paint thinner fumes are no joke. We left everything soaking outside overnight, and came back to scrape them the next day.

The little black toothbrush thingy in front of the paint thinner is a steel wire brush. Bradley was at work so I decided to take care of this easy peasy job on my own. Carpe diem. Girl power. All that stuff.

I drained the paint thinner into another glass jar, pulled out the different hinges one-by-one, and gave them a good scrubbing in the kitchen sink. I brushed the metal in a circular motion and paint starting sloughing off. Perfect. That’s what I was going for. One entire layer of paint came off easily. The second layer, though, wasn’t budging.

I wiped the sweat from my brow. Girl power. I brushed harder and nothing happened. I kicked it up a notch to scrub mode. Still nothing. I scoured, and still nothing. I cursed, I threatened, I spat. Girl! Power! I scrubbed some more, sweat dripping, fingers aching… and then I got a text from Bradley telling me not to use the small wire brush because he had a better idea. He was going to use the grinder with a wire brush attachment and have all the paint off in about 2 minutes. *Single tear.* Everything went back in the paint thinner jar for some more soaking.

And that’s exactly where we left them when we evacuated on Thursday. We’re guessing that after a solid week of soaking in paint thinner, we won’t have to do much scraping to get the gunk off.

While the hardware soaked, we got to work on the door. Up close you can see how gunky the paint is:

It’s not all bad, however. There are some spots where cracks and lines give the door character:

Our challenge is to get rid of all the crusty, gunky bits while keeping the interesting areas in tact. We don’t want to restore this door and have it look like a brand new door from Lowe’s — we want it to look aged and interesting.

We’re pretty sure there’s lead paint in these old doors, so we vented out the room with a window fan and I put on my hot pink ventilator mask (safety first, fashion second!). I spent about 30 minutes sanding this door, and it wasn’t going the way I’d planned.

The sander was scuffing the surface, but the paint wasn’t coming off. Scuffing wasn’t going to do the trick with these doors. The old paint had bubbled up over the years. It needed to be completely stripped off. I needed paint stripper.

Meanwhile Bradley ran out of the caulk he’s using in to seal off the cement window sills so we made a run to the hardware store. We cackled the entire time about getting some caulk and a stripper. Hehe. It still makes me snort. We’re basically 13-year-olds on the inside.

Back at the casa, Bradley showed me how to strip (har har!):

The trick is to put your index finger on top of the blade and use that to apply downward pressure so the blade slides under the paint. Easy peasy. Here’s what the door looked like after scraping off all the loose gunk and giving it a sandjob (once it starts, it’s hard to stop):

The white paint was latex and it came off easily. The yellowish paint underneath? That’s lead paint. Eeps! Bradley was pretty impressed by how hard the layer of paint is (“Say what you will about lead paint, that s**t is durable.“), and we decided to leave it alone. Why bother creating lead dust if we don’t have to?

We were worried that the cracks would disappear if we removed too much old paint, but they were fine. Next step:

Yup, floor & patio paint. For our bathroom door. We spent at least an hour chatting it up with the paint guy at our local hardware store and this is what he recommended for our floors, baseboards, door frames and doors. Each gallon cost a whopping $50, but we splurged on it, but from what we’ve seen so far, it’s worth the extra dough.

We decided to skip the primer because the door was stripped down and scuffed up enough and this black paint gives some serious coverage. Here’s how it looked after one coat:

Still pretty crusty, right? We wanted to get a smooth, even paint application so we decided to do several paper-thin coats. It’s a little more work, but it always results in a very slick paint job. We scuffed the paint lightly with some 120 grit sandpaper:

And gave it a second coat:

This part was really hard to photograph because it was dark outside. I was planning on photographing it in the morning, but then this whole flood thing happened. Still, you get the general idea. What once was clumpy and goopy is now lookin’ pretty lovely. Check out the lovely cracking at the bottom that showed up when the paint dried:

We think it might need a third coat, but won’t be able to tell until we get back to the house. We also have to flip the door over, strip it and paint it white. So the door will be black on the outside but white on the inside. A black door seemed a little too overwhelming for a teeny-tiny bathroom. We’ll wrap that sucker up next weekend and get some better pictures up here.

What we learned from this project:

• Lead paint kinda rocks…if you overlook that whole lead poisoning thing. Stuff was made to last a long, long time.
• Strip first, then sand, and your old door will end up smoother than a baby’s butt. Only with more cracks and wrinkles.

When one door closes, another door…also closes.

That’s our goal for the closet, anyway: two doors that fully open and fully close. It’s not the most inspired of goals, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. We’ve mentioned before that our house has a little bit of a Gangsta Lean. Gravity happens. And at 130 years old, we think our house has earned the right to sag and droop a little.

Anyway, getting both closet doors to fully open and fully close on an unlevel floor has been a pretty serious headache. What started out as a project that would take no more than an hour or 2 ended up taking an entire day. And 4 trips to the hardware store. The first 3 were to our local True Value, and the final trip was to a Lowe’s 15 miles away. The True Value people were already looking at us with raised eyebrows when we walked in the third time.

Half of our closet is up and running, and the other half will be soon. Here’s what we had to do to get one door up:

• Shave a little off the top and bottom of each door to make them level with the floor (aka slightly crooked).
• Realize the doors are so cheaply built that the “shave a little off” has caused the doors to come apart.
• Panic.
• Gorilla Glue the door back together, clamp to dry.
• Realize the cheap plastic hinge at the top and bottom of a door has broken.
• Run to the hardware store.
• Replace the cheap plastic hinge with a better metal hinge.
• Realize the cheap plastic hinge at the top and bottom of the other door has broken.
• Single tear.
• Run to the hardware store. Repeat replacement of cheap parts.
• Reinforce the tops and bottoms of both doors in a way that they will never come apart.
• Realize a completely different cheap part of one door has broken.
• Run to the hardware store.
• Get all the way home before realizing we got the wrong stuff.
• Start hating closet doors. All closet doors. All doors. Down with doors!!
• Back to the hardware store. This time get every imaginable piece of hardware we could possibly need and plan on returning the stuff we don’t use — if we can figure out what we did with that pesky receipt.
• Install one door.
• Single tear.
• Go to the brewery and drown sorrows in a pint.

And now for the good stuff:

Bradley cut and framed the closet in about an hour. The construction is pretty simple. One board across the top, two boards on either side. The boards on the side have a little notch cut out of them and the top board is nestled in between:

We were mimicking the look of our old doorways. Here’s the one in the hallway that we found when we exposed the brick wall and removed all the trim:

We liked the old school carpentry look of the door frame so much that we planned on carrying it over to our other doorways. And then we tore down the original doorway and exposed the brick around it, so there was really no need to go through all those extra steps. Oops.

Take a gander at the doors we got from Lowe’s:

We paid around $160 for the pair. They’re not fancy doors, but they were best out of the selection our local Lowe’s had. In all honesty, we think they’re kinda fugly. We know they’ll look better with a couple of coats of paint, but everything about them just seems so blah. Maybe it’s just our experience with installing the door that’s soured us on it. Or maybe it’s the cheap hardware that came with the doors. Here’s one of the knobs from the package:

Boh-ring! A coat of paint isn’t going to do much for those cheesy door knobs. On our fourth trip to the hardware store, we picked up a pair of oil-rubbed bronze beauties. At $6 a pop, the door knobs weren’t exactly cheap. But it’s a relatively inexpensive upgrade for an otherwise cheap door. We’ll share what our knew knobs look like in the big reveal. We’re suckers for a good ta-da! moment.

Bradley drew a line for the door track. And he installed it right down the center:

This will make the door flush with the sheetrock around it. After that, he installed the hardware for the bottom of the door:

You may notice there are 3 screwholes and only 2 screws in the picture. That’s how the manufacturer packaged it. We’re not sure if we picked up 2 fluke doors or whether that’s just how the company sells them. Either way, it just added to our frustration as we dug through the packages trying to find the “missing” screw.

Bradley tested to make sure the door fit like it should.

And then he removed the door so he could get his plaster on.

We’ve mentioned a couple of times that we plan on leaving a lot of our doors trimless. This is the perfect example of one of those doors.

Bradley carefully taped and plastered the drywall all the way to the door frame, leaving a clean edge:

Basically, this means there’s no gap between the frame and the drywall, so the frame itself looks like the trim. This is definitely one of those love-it-or-hate-it design choices, but we love the way a trimless door looks.

After we put on 3 coats, we’ll scrape off the dry plaster from the door frame and paint it to match the floors. But we have a lot to do before we get to that point.

The door frame has a few cracks, knots and nail holes that need to be filled. Bradley grabbed a tub of wood filler and got to work:

Is it weird that we’ve just come to accept dirt under fingernails as a fact of life? As if it’s completely normal to walk around all the time with a thin under-the-nail layer of grime? And don’t even get us started on callouses. Bradley’s philosophy: they’re nature’s work gloves.

Applying wood filler is pretty much the same as plastering.

We use a small plastic palette knife to scrape across gaps and holes, and don’t worry about using too much. Once it dries, we’ll sand it and apply another coat if needed.

We had to do some digging in iPhoto, but we found the official before picture for the guest bedroom closet. Here’s what it looked like back in early May:

And here’s what the guest bedroom closet looks like today:

OK, fine, it’s not from the same angle. And I’m pretty sure the before pic was taking on an iPhone. And, yes, the “after” picture is before we plastered. But we think you get the general idea.

Before: crap.
After: not so crap.

Now we need to finish plastering, install the second door and prep the room for painting.

What we learned from our closet door fiasco adventure:

• Cheap hollow doors? Think twice before cutting them. Or at least plan ahead and have a bunch of supplies on hand in case things go south.
• Measure twice, cut once. Unless you’re dealing with super old, super uneven floors. Then you’ll need to measure at least 20 times and carefully shave off your wood 1/8″ at a time.
• If you live in a small town, get to know the locations and hours of a few different hardware stores. People totally judge out here. They judge hard.
• Make a mean face while sawing. It’ll scare the wood into submission.