I have finally painted all my interior doors (on the first floor) of my home a beautiful navy blue. And I couldn’t be happier.
I’ve seen so many others paint their interior doors black but black is too harsh for me. I did, however, want a neutral color like black, dark and rich and classy, but not quite as harsh as black. Hence navy blue which in my opinion is a neutral. I tried it out on my garage door, as seen in this photo below, a couple years ago and knew that would be the choice for my interior doors as well.
My Dad lives in California and I live in Utah. But he comes to town a few times a year and we always end up doing some DIY project, like painting dining room chairs or building this headboard. There isn’t much my Dad can’t do, he’s the handiest man I know. So on this particular trip to Utah we painted the doors navy blue. And by we, I mean he painted and I did prep work like wiping doors, pouring paint, and getting him a diet Mountain Dew every hour. My dad rocks. And he has 30 years experience spraying with an air compressed sprayer so I am happy to let him do the real work. I am not a perfectionist but even I know that some things need to look nearly perfect.
The color is Archipelago by Sherwin Williams in a Satin finish purchased at Lowe’s. (The original color was Sailor’s Coat by Olympic paint that I used on the garage door. Both colors are virtually identical so choose either.) A true navy blue is almost black so I chose carefully—I wanted it be a cross between a navy blue and a royal blue. We used a gallon and half to paint 12 doors. The week we painted it was nearly 100 degrees each day so we figured (through trial and error) that watering the paint down with quite a bit of tap water enabled us to spray the doors really heavily for nearly a one-coat coverage BEFORE the hellish desert heat would dry them. Before we watered down the paint it was drying so quickly it was leaving marks on the doors, kind of like when you use spray paint from a can. Watering it down to about 90% paint, 10% water did the trick. Had the temperatures been lower I’m not sure we would have needed to water it down but it did seem to make spraying them go on easier, hot or not. With a few exceptions one heavy coat is all they needed.
My kids are old enough to be helpers. And summer vacation dictates I use them as slaves. So they did most of the removing of the doors, cleaning the doors, and drilling off all the hardware. And then they added all the hardware back. And hung them again. Good kids.
Spraying 12 doors took 2 days. Utah is hot and never humid so the doors dried fast enabling us to flip them and coat the back usually within two hours. When we flipped the doors over we laid towels across the 2x4 strips for a ‘softer’ place to rest them. We didn’t want any new paint being scratched while we painted the flip side. I had one set of saw horses and bought another so that Dad could spray 5-6 at a time.
As mentioned above, it was so hot at 100 degrees that the overspray dried before it hit the garage floor. Well, most of it did. So I could actually sweep up the excess paint at the end of the project. But the floor is still a little blue and my Dad said a pressure washer will remove that. I don’t really care, it’s the garage floor. Lay down tarps though if you do care. My husband cares. Bummer.
I am in love with these doors. It really classes up things around my house.
Above is a small hallway, below is the master bedroom which is all neutrals and navy blue anyway.
A few tips:
1. Make sure you label your doors with a pencil on the bottom. Even though we didn’t paint the bottom of the door the overspray covered them and then I couldn’t see which door went wear so I began writing the name of the location of door, then covering it with tape to protect the name. Once we were done painting I removed the tape and could easily tell which door went where.
2. Color is Archipelago by Sherwin Williams in a Satin finish. I chose Satin for a slight sheen that is only seen when light reflects off of it. Yum.
3. Don’t dry doors in direct sunlight when it is 100 degrees. The door will warp. We did this to a couple doors as we got antsy for them to dry and it took us a day or two to ‘bend’ them back into shape.
4. Watering down the paint makes it spray on with no trails or spray marks. More details in blog post above.
