Who’s a doorknob? Not me! August 12, 2011

As you know, I’m fixing up our little house on a tiny budget hoping to at least break even (but maybe make a little profit) when we sell in this awful, awful housing market.  My latest project cost a total of $9 for a can of oil-rubbed bronze spray paint, and took only a couple of hours (plus dry-time) to complete.  Half of the doorknobs in our house are beautiful and original to the house, but the other half looked like this:

That’s some sweet brass complimented by even sweeter rust and paint splotches.  How the previous owners got paint all over all over the strike plates, I’ll never know.

Instead of spending lots of money buying new ones (or living with them, which was the original plan), I decided to have a go at spray painting them.  I actually came across this idea on pinterest here (the original post is from here though).  I figured oil-rubbed bronze would look better than black or a different metallic spray paint, so I went with that.  First, I took all the door hardware off, and then I cleaned and lightly sanded it all.  Then I laid it out on an old piece of plywood that I use for all my spray painting, and stuck all the knobs and screws into some old Styrofoam to make the job a little easier.

Here’s a “during” shot after the first coat.  I ended up doing 3 coats.

I’m quite pleased with how they turned out!  They look MUCH better than before.  I know the strike plates will get scratched a little as time goes on (a couple are already a tiny bit dinged up), but really, they were pretty dinged up anyways before the spray paint, and that’s the easiest part to touch up as needed.

Don’t they look a million times better?!?  And for any of you skeptics out there, here’s a close-up:

They might not be perfectly my style, but they are certainly much better than before!

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