Painting and doors

Our latest big project: replacing all of the crappy 1970's scratched up fake wood closet doors with new, nicer ones.  I know we usually try to reuse and repair everything, but in this case, due to ugliness, we had to make an exception. Maybe we could have tolerated them longer, but when we built the Arizona room, we put nice six panel wooden doors on that closet.  The AZ room closet is about two feet away from the laundry closet, and being able to see the old and the new at the same time just highlighted how terrible the original doors were.

I know it may seem like I'm exaggerating, but I'm not.  These doors were so terrible that even the Habistore rejected them, and told us they don't accept those doors because nobody will buy them.  However, they did tell us to stack them outside by the dumpster and promised that someone would come along and take them eventually.  It felt a little weird abandoning the doors rather than donating them, but apparently that's what they do there (plus an employee told us that a couple of days earlier someone had picked up about 20 closet doors from that spot, so there is hope that they really will be taken and used).

The new doors are all six panel folding wooden doors that we purchased at Lowe's.  One for the pantry, two each for the laundry closet, back bedroom, and front bedroom/playroom.  They are now all painted and installed, except for the one in the playroom.  That one is installed but unpainted, because we're still debating repainting the walls.  It's amazing what a difference it makes - the rooms look so much lighter and brighter.

There was some difficulty with the paint, namely that we were out of the light blue kitchen wall paint that we needed for both the pantry and the laundry closet - and apparently that brand of paint no longer exists.  Well, maybe it exists, since it does still have a website, but the store locator on it tells me that no stores within a hundred miles carries it.  Furthermore, just for fun I checked and no stores within a hundred miles of Phoenix, Chicago, New York or Los Angeles carry it either.  Luckily, Ace Hardware has a color matching service - and it was almost perfect.  Plus, that allowed us to get the paint in the Benjamin Moore Natura that we used in the bedrooms (it's a no VOC paint that didn't exist when we painted the kitchen, so we used a different and apparently unsuccessful low-VOC brand from another store).

It's kind of amazing to me how one little change can make things look better - and highlight what still looks bad.  Here, the chain of events was getting nice closet doors in one room, leading to needing nice ones in the other rooms, which then led to the current project of painting the dark brown door that divided the kitchen and AZ room. We were able to live with that particular brand of ugliness for years, until we had nice closets on each side of it.  Once that's done, who knows? Perhaps we'll realize how ugly our countertops are and decide to replace those (just kidding, we already know they're ugly).