Small Project.

I haven't really posted much this week.  That's because I had a few setbacks that I wasn't expecting.  First of all, beginning Tuesday morning and worsening throughout the day and evening, I developed a cold, which turned into sore throat, which turned into loss of voice completely, which turned into body aches.  Yeah, that sucked.  So I was useless for about a day and a half.  I still did make it to school, though.  Then, Wednesday evening, just as I was feeling much better I decided to go to a step aerobic class at the gym.  Well, about 75% of the way through the class, I missed the step.  I thought I twisted my ankle.  But it felt much worse than all of the other times I have twisted my ankle.  I finished the song with great pain, thinking it would go away, then promptly gathered my things and left in even greater pain.  By the time I got home (10 minutes later), I had a bruise on the front of my ankle.  But I didn't hit it on anything.  So I think I sprained it... which I had never done before.  Unfortunately, after some research, it doesn't seem like it will get better fast.  I am a little sad about not being about to do my regular gym workout, but we will see how it goes.  On to the real topic of this post...

We have a problem in our house.  All of the door knobs are brass.  I hate brass.  I saw on a young house love post how they spray painted their door handles/knobs.  It was a success.  But they spray painted them brown.  I don't exactly want brown, but silver would be okay.  I found some cool ones that we could replace them with here, here, and here.  I really like the look of silver door "handles" as opposed to brass "knobs":

NO.

YES!

I talked a little in this post about how I went to Wal-Mart ("Wally-World" or "Wal-Market") and bought some spray paint to give it a go and see how it went.  I bought primer, very fine sandpaper, two different metallic spray paints (one light and one dark) and glosser to go over it.  

The reason why I chose to go this route is because if we actually purchase all of those door knobs, it will be pretty expensive (at least a couple hundred bucks).  So Plan B is to try and spray paint them a nickel-ish/silver/metallic color. 

I decided to use the door knob from our home office closet because it's not in the "public view", as in, if it doesn't work out and people come to our house, it the first thing they see when they walk in the door won't be so offensive.  So, I took the door knob off myself.  Yeah, I totally thought this was going to be a hard job. Uhh... NOT.  I took a screwdriver and screwed the thing off in about 43 seconds.  I took it outside and set it up on an old piece of cardboard:

In fear of scratching the metal, I chose the finest grit sandpaper I could find (320).  Aren't these things awesome?  They are easy to hold and handle, and they fit into corners easily:

Yes, I am wearing bright yellow nail polish.  Don't hate.

And after sanding, it was much less shiny...

I primed it (two coats)...

Then spray painted it with the lighter color that I chose (4 thin coats).  The darker color was clearly not going to work.  It looked almost black:

Then I sprayed two coats of the "crystal clear enamel".  It's essentially just like a spray gloss.  Then I screwed it back on the door upstairs in the office and this is how it turned out.

There is a dilemma.  We can't tell if we like it.  It looks generally like the look we were going for.  But it has that spray-paint-textured kind of look.

So, it's not too bad. But it reminds of a bit of plastic.  I can't tell if it looks cheap or not.  And if it does look cheap, I definitely don't want to do the rest of the doors like that.  But if it doesn't look too bad (better than the brass) I will do the rest.  What do you think?

Then, of course, there is the other debate.  Should I also spray these brass parts so they all match?