MIGRY: June 2013

If you have seen these beautiful photo of doors painted black on pinterest, here is tutorial of what it will require to complete.

These doors can be painted by hand or with a spray with an airless paint sprayer. If you choose to hand paint, you could just do a door a day and complete it in a few months or weeks. The clean up will be really messy because black is a really hard color to clean up, and the set up each day it going to take a lot of time. Using an airless paint sprayer will save so much time! I would highly recommend spraying it.

First up:

PREP:

Wipe down each door, get all the edges with a with a tooth brush. Any dust you leave on the door will show in your paint. Make sure you rinse out the cloth in between each door you wipe down. You could use a tacky cloth is you have a lot of dust in your home.

Take off all the hardware. First take off all door knobs and door stops. It is easier to take off the door knobs first, then take the doors off. If you are going to keep the same hinges you can either tape them over or remove them.

If you are keeping the same hinges, it will be much better if you remove them. It is really hard to take paint off of them, and it will look cleaner when finished. As you remove the doors mark on tape or on the hinge where that door belongs.

When you finish you just look at where you have marked it and take it back to the location. Doors have specific sizes, and it could become difficult to figure out where the doors go after painting. Take the hinge closed so you don't paint over it.

PAINTING AREA:
Find an area you can hang up all the doors to paint. You can use an unfinished basement, a garage, or outdoors. Where ever you are going to paint you will need to prep the area so the extra paint doesn't get on everything. Make sure that the over spray will not get on walls, floors, carpet, or cars! Put visqueen plastic down on the floor, and walls.
We used our backyard and put visqueen down on the grass.

We screwed pieces of 2x2 on the tops of the doors to keep them stable.

Prep for paint and start painting. We had 24 doors, and 6 bi-fold closet doors for a total of 30 doors to be painted. It took 6 1/2 gallons of paint to coat these doors twice and do some touch up.

Paint the doors. Make sure you get down low to catch all the under side edges.
Let the doors dry 3+ hours.

Clean up: Take all the 2x2's off the tops of doors. DO NOT stack the doors on top of each other, they will stick and ruin your paint. Make sure you use visqueen on the surface you lean them on and on your floors. I cut out 3'x1' sheets and placed them behind the doors while cleaning up and then again under the doors at the doors specific location in side our house.

Clean up!

We started this project at about 1:00 PM, and had planned on 5-6 hours. We should have planned that it would take more time. We didn't want the doors sitting outside all night, so when we were done painting we had to let them dry and then take all the doors back inside. We finished the project around 11:00 at night! (Doors just placed in their locations, not hung up.) Ten hours of moving heavy doors and working in 90 degree temps was extremely hard. The next day we spent about another 4-5 hours hanging doors back up. We love the look of the doors! It looks amazing and we are so happy. Just plan on it taking more time than you think. A rule that contractors use is estimate the time you think it will take and then double it! The time we spent was more than double.