Door makeover

Spring at the new house (photo credit: Kayla Young)

I've taken a bit of a break on the blog because it seems like we haven't been able to finish anything. We've started a ton of stuff, but just can't finish because of a ton of things: a terrible bout of food poisoning for me and my daughter, a worldwide COVID-19 pandemic means that we often can't get supplies because we don't want to go inside of a home supply store...and there was that small incident with a table saw and my husband. OK - it wasn't a small incident, he lost the tips of a couple of fingers and mangled a couple more. He is doing much better now -- thanks to amazing doctors who did a great job putting his hand back together. His fingers are a little shorter, but they still work, and he is back to work on the house. We are very thankful that all turned out better than we had hoped.

As I get back to writing about what we are doing with our house, I decided to start with something that I've been wanting to change...our interior doors. The doors are flat and wood with brass hinges and gold doorknobs. The optimal thing to do would be to replace the doors, but evidently it isn't that easy. In order to replace the doors, you really have to replace the whole door frame and door. And the doors that look really nice are about $400 each. In just the downstairs area, there are four doors ($1600!), so we had to come up with a different solution. We could purchase cheap doors with the frame at around $100, but the doors were just cheap builder grade and really weren't what we wanted.

Then the husband came up with an incredible idea. He took small pieces of wood trim and built a new part of the door. By the way, he isn't allowed to use a table saw anymore, so this was done with a simple miter box and a hand saw. He used his nail gun to attach the trim pieces to the door, then we used wood putty to fill those holes.

Miter box used with a hand saw

Trim attached with nail gun

Then the hubby used the paint sprayer to spray on two coats of Kilz Hide-All Interior Primer, then two more coats of Valspar Signature Ultra White Satin Paint. We had to do that many coats on each side to just to cover the wood, but when we got finished, it looked amazing!

The hubby only wanted his hand in the pic -- it's the one with the shorter fingers!

My daughter had a great idea to get black door knobs and hinges and it was a great decision. Amazon had great prices on both the doorknobs and the hinges and we didn't have to go inside of the store - bonus!

My daughters are very excited to finally have doors on their bedrooms and bathroom! They've been staying with us during the pandemic and have been without doors for about 2 months now. They are ecstatic to have a little privacy and I'm thrilled with  the way that these turned out.

Total cost per door = $25 (not including paint because we already had that). That's a lot better than $400 each and I think they look fabulous!