Out with the old, in with the... old?

When we moved into our sweet little green house with its wet yard and antique air-leaking sliding glass back doors and half-a-kitchen worth of cabinetry (love ya housey, I'm just stating the facts here), one of the projects we put near the top of our list was sort of a minor facelift for the interior.

While it was perfectly fine with us that every single doorknob in the house didn't match, and while it didn't bother us that all the doorknobs were brass (the light fixtures or kitchen hardware are that oil-rubbed bronze or brushed steel, but a doorknob is a doorknob), it really did bother us that the knobs were original to the house, which was built in 1986, and many of them were badly corroded. The brass had corroded off some of the doorknobs, and that made them look rather gross. And what made it even worse for me was that the nastiest-looking one was on the hallway bathroom door, the bathroom that everybody uses when they visit, and we use on a daily basis. Yuk! "Welcome to my home. Please, make yourself comfortable. Enjoy yourself. And, please, caress our disgusting doorknob. But before you do, be sure to wash up and dry your hands on the monogrammed hand towels! Then touch the nasty doorknob."

So, Carlton and I went to Lowe's and to Home Depot. We priced out the number of doorknobs that were in the house, putting into thought the number of closet doors (no locks), as well as bathroom and bedroom doors (locks, please!). It was outrageous how much money it was going to cost us just to replace this hardware... I tried to suppress the amount from my memory, but I think it was going to be about $400! Just for doorknobs. I would rather have more kitchen cabinets for that, thankyouverymuch!

Then I remembered all of the great spray paints that are out there on the market. My parents recently spray painted all of the kitchen cabinet hardware in a house they own and rent out. My sister-in-law Katie spray painted some plastic outdoor play equipment for our niece Katie Anne this past summer. And they make some really nice spray paints these days! I even used one type of spray paint with sand in it to spray onto the side of a to-scale model house I constructed in my college design classes. It was a really realistic brick effect!

The spray paint we found was perfect for what we were looking for. All we needed to do was take off the hardware, line it all up, and spray away. And, at about $3.00 for a can of primer ("highly recommended") and $6.50 for a can of the finishing "hand-hammered bronze" effect (yup, it's even slightly textured!), how could we not give this a shot? $9.50 in a test run sure does beat $400 of replacing doorknobs, so why wouldn't we at least try it first? And, if the paint chips or peels or rubs off, all we're out is a few bucks, and at least we tried it out!

So, here's what we did. It was really quick and really easy. We started at about 4:00 in the afternoon. First, we found a good, flat space in the back yard (not hard to find around these parts!), laid out a heavy painting canvas, and laid out all of our doorknobs. Next, we sprayed them with primer. Let that dry, flipped them, sprayed the other side with primer. Let that dry, sprayed them with the first coat of the good stuff. Let that dry, flipped them, sprayed the other side with the good stuff. After that last round dried we brought them in because it was getting dark.

After the doorknobs dried and set overnight, we checked them out in fresh daylight the next morning. Of course, there were a couple of thin paint places here and there, so we touched them up with a little spritz and let them dry some more.

Installed, the doorknobs look brand new!!! If you weren't told that they didn't all match and that they were actually old grody corroded doorknobs from the 80's, you would never know they weren't brand spankin' new!