The Power of Paint | Week 3 | Spring One Room Challenge

I already know that paint completely transforms any item it touches. However, every single time I use it I am still blown away by the transformation!! Let me back up though… We are in Week 3 of the Spring One Room Challenge! You can check out Week 1 and Week 2 to see what we’ve done so far.

One huuuuge reason we decided to choose our master bathroom for this challenge is because we had sort of started this room a year ago, but couldn’t commit to finishing the space. Good ‘ol Dad built a custom cabinet for us last summer. When we moved in it was just open Ikea shelves with a glass back. I don’t know about you, but I totally needed doors that can hide the clutter. I love my cute little decorative pieces, but I need a place I can just shut that door and forget about it. Below is that real before.

My dad was trying so hard to make this new cabinet match our existing vanity and bathroom. This was before I had decided I wanted to put the time into designing the whole space. I told Dad to just do whatever he thought. He made the inside a gray barnwood to match our sliding barn doors…. which, now we are painting. Ha ha… Why didn’t I just bite the bullet and design this space back then??? I’m totally kicking myself because we now have to work around so much that I didn’t think I’d care about. I do like this gray inside the cabinet though.

We had a cabinet maker make the cabinet doors to match the shaker style that was on the current vanity. We gave them the exact details of what we needed and 4 new wood doors cost about $200. They were supposed to be raw, untreated wood and ready to stain, but when we started staining them the stain kept repelling!!! It would bead off and wouldn’t absorb into the wood! AAAHHH! For four weekends in a row my husband tried to stain them. He tried every trick YouTube had to offer and it was fruitless. Finally, he color matched a paint to the stain to just paint them to look wood. Neither of us liked how it turned out though. It was such a time consuming, soul sucking process that we said eff it and set them aside FOR A YEAR! That is exactly why I decided to hire Blue Silver Design to paint these cabinets! Both my husband and I were so over dealing with them. We did use Klean Strip Paint Stripper to strip that crappy paint off before having her paint them. It’s a heavy duty stripper that you need a mask and gloves to use, but it works fabulously.

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We ALWAYS do our own home renovation projects. A lot of times with help from family and friends. Dad is definitely a huge help, too. BUT, this is such a crazy time in our world. With this pandemic, so many small businesses are hurting. Many have had to close or cease work until the quarantine lifts for them. I am a huge advocate for shopping small and local. Especially, since that’s how I run some of my business. Selling vintage has not been on the essential business list. Aubrey, of Blue SIiver Design, is a one woman show and she is a killer cabinet painter. I knew I had to get her help and support her business. When working on a timeline it really does help to hire out a time consuming project, too. Especially one you have so much disdain for.

For the vanity I filled all the drawer and knob holes with wood filler. The current hardware was not the style I was wanting and the size was not a common size to replace, plus I found the perfect handles, Menlo Park in satin brass from Schaub & Company to replace them with. Filling the holes was super easy and now I get the style I want. Once painted, you’ll never see the original holes!

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Blue Sliver Design uses Benjamin Moore Advance paint on cabinets. Its a high quality, durable paint. Durability was huge for me since we have a family of five and my kids are definitely rough on things. Ok, ok, so am I! It’s easy to wipe down and will hold up over time. These cabinets took two coats and 16 hours to cure in between. She was able to use her paint sprayer on the doors and drawers to give a really nice even coat. We had Benjamin Moore color match the paint to Sherwin Williams Tricorn Black. That is my favorite black paint and it’s throughout my house. It’s the paint color that is in the adjoining master bedroom. I wanted to make sure the same color would flow from the bedroom to the bathroom. Also, when you find a color you love, you stick with it.

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We got hinges for the cabinet to match the existing vanity hinges which were currently a rubbed bronze color. Like everything else I bought a year ago, I hadn’t thought about what color I’d want in advance. They were super dark, but not quite black like the paint. Another easy fix though. We laid them all out and a can of black satin spray paint and voila! They are black and will blend in so much better. Spray paint is one of the handiest DIY supplies ever!

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Hanging the new doors on the custom face frame is a bit trickier. Hanging inset doors, doors that sit inside the frame, is much more difficult than overlay doors, doors that hang on the front of the frame. Getting everything to line up perfectly was a bit harder than we anticipated. You can see what I mean below. You can see the difference of inset doors, partial overlay doors, and full overlay doors. With the inset you have to make sure that tiny gap at the top and bottom line up perfectly so that they don’t look crooked. Sometimes real wood expands over time. If that happens with inset doors they may get too tight to open. I think ours may have warped a bit in the year they sat in the garage. So when we hung them they were a tad too tight. We used a planer to skim down the edge to make them fit. If we had overlay doors we could’ve avoided doing that. If I were to create a cabinet again I would definitely do full overlay. The full overlay gives the nice clean look the way inset doors do, but they are so much easier to hang.

I can’t even describe how happy I am to have these doors up and hiding all my bathroom necessities. There is something so satisfying about shutting the door on the clutter!

I’m glad we could use the power of paint to keep our same vanity and give it a whole new look! It saved us a ton of money and took it from basic, to sleek and modern! Can you tell I looove paint?!? Especially black paint. It’s the easiest and cheapest way to make a big impact. Blue Sliver Design totally nailed it!

Now, I can’t wait to show you them with the Schaub & Company hardware. It’s going to bring out the modern-glam aesthetic I’m going for. If you want to watch what we are doing in real time, follow my Instagram, Ms Vicious Design!

Cheers Friends –

Jenasie