Adding Paneling to Hollow-Core Doors

I've been pretty obsessed with raised paneling lately and when it was time to figure out something to do with the closet doors in the studio, I knew I wanted to experiment a little with moulding and see if I could make the cheap hollow-core door look more interesting for not a lot of money.

Here's a sort-of during shot of the studio, after we had painted the walls and done the floors and other trimwork, but before I did any decorating.

I remembered these wooden rounds from Home Depot and found some trim (it's called brick moulding) that was the same thickness as the rounds.

When I got home I experimented with tape patterns to try and figure out something that would work with the door proportions. It can be a little tricky to get it right with the door hardware and while leaving a sort of toe kick/kick plate area at the bottom. These doors are short too, so it felt extra difficult. At first I tried to make three circles work and they didn't really fit, but mostly it just looked like a giant stop light. Not cute.

I knew what my circle + square dimensions had to be, so I cut out four of the squares first for the two doors. Then I played around with the scrap moulding to figure out a rectangle for center area. I tried a few different sizes and even tried a rectangular panel to match the layering of the circle + square, but in the end I decided to keep it simple and small with just the brick moulding.

So the real trick with adding moulding to any door is to spend your time on the top shape and get that one perfectly perfect and squared with the edges of the door. And then the other shapes can just be placed using the lines of the first shape. Hopefully your first square is not at all crooked, but if it is, it's better for the other shapes on the door to be equally slightly crooked. That sounds weird, but your eye won't really notice if the whole thing is just a little tiny bit off, but if the individual shapes have been corrected and are off in relation to each other, that's when thinks start looking wonky and bad-DIY.

So, after I measure out and spend a lot of time getting that top square right, I just used a piece of scrap wood to line up the trim for the next square. The line will be perfectly even and straight this way.

I nailed on the paneling with my angled nailer with 1 1/4" brads, since the wooden round and brick moulding were so thick. And then everything got caulked and a light sanding.

I guess I didn't take a photo of this step, but before I painted the doors and paneling, I sprayed the door handles gold outside (without removing them first! Rebel!). I also replaced the old door hinges with new solid brass ones.

I regret not taking the time and effort to spray the doors with my Critter spray gun, but I was up against a time crunch, so I just brushed them with oil-based paint tinted to Benjamin Moore's Gentleman's Gray, which is actually a really beautiful, deep navy. 

The finish is not bad since I laid the doors down to paint them and oil-based paint spreads really beautifully. But it's not exactly perfect like it could have been if I had sprayed them. :(

I'm still happy with the doors though! They make the weird closets that flank my desk sort of a fun part of the room now. Eye-sore-turned-room-feature is my favorite kind of DIY.

I especially like how the light catches the dimension of the paneling in such a pretty way. I love all the shadows.

New Red Door and Lemon Trees

I had hoped that by now we would have finished more with the outside of the house, but it looks like we'll probably leave the exterior projects for next spring. We're making some big changes to the trim (mostly just ripping it out) and to the front portico area that I'm really excited about. (Remember here?)

I think just a paint job will go really far. And actually, when the painters were here a few weeks ago, they offered to paint the front door. It's so bright and shiny now that the rest of the house looks extra old and dingy! :) It's got me excited to get the whole house painted and cleaned up in the next couple months.

To help the pretty rough-looking space look a little more put together, I picked up these chalky black planters at Home Depot and these Meyer lemon trees from Lowe's.  I can't even begin to describe to you how heavenly these blossoms smell!

I've tried keeping citrus trees indoors before and I think I just didn't have enough sunlight to keep the plants happy and they've always died. The guy in the Lowe's nursery recommended using cactus soil with rocks at the bottom of the planters for drainage, and he suggested letting the soil dry out so much in between waterings that the leaves begin to droop. So far, so good.

I love the little trees! And I love the new bright color of the doors, but, admittedly, I was a little sad to drive up for the first time and see that the jamb was painted red too.

It was my fault for not telling the painters specifically to paint the jamb white and I wasn't here on the day they painted the door. Since they threw in the labor on the door for free, I felt like it wouldn't be at all fair to ask them to fix it. I'll just have it changed when we have the rest of the house painted. It's not that big of a deal. (It just looks so Christmas-y right now with the old green and yellow trim still exposed. Ha!) I've since got the creamy white siding color-matched and now I just need to find an hour to paint it out. I'm know that will be a huge improvement and the red jamb will be less annoying to me. :)

I do really love how the red looks with the new entry rug though!

I feel like we're getting there! Slowly but surely this house is starting to feel more and more like ours. It makes me excited to think about all the changes I hope we'll have done by next Christmas.

New Door Hardware and Keep.com

You guys already know about a lot of these plans, but I was thinking earlier today, as I was spending a royal fortune online on door hardware, that it's funny how one small decision in a remodel can turn into a seriously huge black hole of additional projects. It all started out innocently enough. Here was my train of thought:

1) This is very possibly our forever home, and I don't love the existing floors.

2) Some day I'd love to put in new hardwood floors throughout the house.

3) On second thought the new floors should definitely go in before our stuff comes at the end of the month. Let's take advantage of the empty house.

4) In order to put in the new floors, I guess we have to demo everything that will eventually be going out so that we don't have to patch the wood later (which would be expensive and a huge pain).

5) The old front door sticks really bad when you try to open it. Also the handleset is really difficult to use and needs to be replaced soon. Sounds like it's time for a new front door.

And maybe a new doorbell while we're at it.

6) If I had my choice I'd go with a taller double door (the current one feels really squatty with the high ceilings). Which means the threshold will be different per the door installer. Of course.

7) New threshold will change quite a lot, turns out. And it will effect the new floors. So we spring for a new front door now.

8) And also a new handleset ($$$$! ouch!).

But how exciting to replace this:

9) A new handleset means we need to come out and have a locksmith change the locks. Our home warranty policy pays for all the locks to be changed at once. Of which there are plenty - taking advantage of this deal saves us a lot of money. Here's what my door hardware currently looks like.

10) Yeah... I'm thinking I maybe should just replace all the door hardware in the house now too. The locksmith confirms I should have the new hardware installed before he comes out.

11) New hardware means new door hinges.

12) New hinges means I should probably just paint all my doors now. I know I can replace the hinges one by one without taking down the doors, but if I'm going to take down the doors to paint them at some point, might as well only unscrew all those hinges one time.

13) If I'm painting all my doors, maybe I should by that paint sprayer I've been dreaming of for years...

14) Etc., etc., etc.

Point is - holy domino effect!! Looks like the money I put aside for new bedroom furniture will be dedicated to all aspects of new door hardware. That's okay though - shopping for door hardware is almost as fun for me as shopping for new headboards. I just wish they didn't cost about the same in the end! :)

One of my favorite sponsors, Keep.com, has come in handy as I've been managing all of these purchases (and my wish lists). Especially for things like door hardware - where I'm comparing a ton of different options. Keep helps me, well, keep track of all my shopping wish lists and potential purchases. Truly, it is SUCH a helpful service. I still use Pinterest for my inspiration images, but I use Keep for my shopping.

Here's a mini tutorial. Just like Pinterest, you quickly install a Keep It button in your menu bar. Then you do your normal web browsing and online shopping. Any time you come across a product for sale that you love and want to remember for later, you press the Keep It button on your menu bar. A little window pops up that helps you save the keep in the right collection and then you're done and you can close out the window of the product.

Before I started using Keep, my bookmarks were so completely out of control that they were pretty useless. So then I would literally have like a dozen windows with each a dozen or more tabs each. And then by the time I would actually look through those tabs again, the item would be sold out.

I've been using Keep to store all my house finds (and my fashion finds too - it seems like that's what most keepers use the site for). Here's my door hardware collection.

The very best part of Keep is getting to follow other keepers. You start finding people that have your same style and the aggregate result ends up being a little like having a personal online shopper! Crowd sourcing at its finest. Thanks to my keepers I found a new suit that has been garnering endless complements at our neighborhood pool:

Here are some more of my boards. I'll be doing more keeping this weekend as we unpack a lot of our stuff and start to notice holes in the furniture layouts, missing lighting, need for more rugs, etc, etc. Let me know if you join in on the fun so I can follow you. :) Happy weekend!

This post was a collaboration with Keep.com which is a sponsor of LGN. Thank you for supporting our sponsors!