In Love with Oiled Bronze

I decided this spring that while we may not have the funds to tackle the larger ticket projects, I could start working on the smaller ones - the ones that don't require an excessive budget but do need either elbow grease or time. I have always been attracted to oiled bronze finishes, but never really noticed or acknowledged it until I started to tackle some of these projects. Isn't it funny how a key component of our style has always been there but just out of sight? For example, here are some pictures of items that I had already implemented in my home with an oiled bronze finish.

 

Like this sign that hangs on the front of our house. My husband is a Navy veteran and so I proudly display this as a reminder of his service to our country.

 

And years ago I had purchased this little bell. It reminded me of the farmhouse bell that was hung at my grandparent's farm. 

 

A few years ago when I purchased a small patio set, I purchased one with an oiled bronze finish and brown woven seats.

 

I didn't even think about my pot rack until I was taking photographs of the finished projects with oiled bronze components! My lovely pot rack that we installed a couple of years ago to hold my stainless steel pots and pans and my ever-growing collection of cast iron cookware.

Earlier this spring I decided that I needed to do something with all of the exterior doors. They are all unfinished, steel doors. In an ugly gray finish. Two years ago we decided on the colors for the house - of which one of the accent colors was a charcoal. I was wandering in Wal-Mart's spray paint aisle looking at paint options for the doors when I saw the metallic collection - with an oiled bronze color. I decided to give it a try. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a "before" picture, but here is another door from the house in the same gray steel finish. 

 

Not the best looking door. And all the wear and tear and fingerprints on it appear to be dirty brown and yucky color. This made the oiled bronze a good color choice since it can hide a lot of the wear and tear that our household puts on doors. The first door I painted was the front door. And I love...love...love how it turned out! 

 

One door down and four more to go. I actually bought the cans of spray paint needed to paint the rest of the exterior doors, but they got used on a surprise Mother's Day present - a front porch swing! I have wanted a porch swing ever since we bought this house...in 2011. Yes, projects take us a very long time to complete. We are not the Turtle Construction Company like the Duggars; we are the Slow-as-Snails Renovation Company! My goal is to have all the projects done before the house is paid in full or all the kids move out!

 

I was more than happy to use all my cans of paint for the doors fixing up this swing. I really enjoy sitting out there on a nice, warm day enjoying cuddling with my quilt while reading a good book. There is nothing that compares to it.

In addition to painting the exterior doors, I decided to paint the interior doors as well. We plan on replacing the cheaper, hollow core doors with solid wood ones at some point. However, I have to live with these doors for right now. It took me some time - and cleaning - to realize that these doors were purchased pre-primed and then never painted by the home owner that installed them. I would try to clean them and the finish would turn a disgusting shade of gray. As usual, I forgot to take a before picture, but there are a lot of these doors in the house - all identical in style and type.

 

This picture does not do justice to how incredibly disgusting this door really is. Just trust me. It is nasty. Well, Wal-Mart was selling on clearance Almond Enamel paint. This was a nice, high gloss and easily washable paint that I thought would work perfectly for the doors. Cleaning them has been really easy. I tackled the dirtiest and nastiest door on the first floor - the bathroom door. This door gets a lot of handling, especially when we are working in the garden. Lots of dirty fingerprints cover just about every available surface of this room. I chose the almond color because I felt that it was a nice, warm color compared to the dirty gray. Plus, with the kids, a bright stark white just would not work. And I did not want dark colored doors as I want  our rooms to be as large, bright and airy as possible. 

 

I also chose the almond color because I thought it showcased the oiled bronze handsets beautifully. A true complement of finishes. Doesn't that look so nice?

 

This past week we had two unplanned projects land in our lap - a broken toilet and a leaking kitchen faucet. The plastic handle on the toilet snapped. I temporarily fixed it by tying a string to the chain that controls the flapper thing. We have really hard water so the guts of the toilet were in pretty bad shape after about 7 years of use. A week of flushing the toilet with the string seemed to have skewed the flapper position as well. My husband decided that we would upgrade and replace the inserts. Since we had to buy a new handle anyway, I chose one with a - you guessed it - oiled bronze finish. 

 

Doesn't that look nice? It is such an upgrade from the original cheap plastic handle. Plus, this is the toilet that has had the seat replaced - not just once; not twice; but three times! I don't think the problem is us. I think it is the quality of the plastic thingamajiggy that secures the seat to the toilet. We keep breaking those silly plastic things!

We discovered that the kitchen sink was leaking really bad. Some of the plastic gaskets had broken and the caulk was missing from around three-fourths of the sink. We had replaced the faucet about three years ago for the same reason. Instead of choosing a good, quality faucet, we went with the cheapest option we could find. It was more of an emergency and necessity. However, this time, I was blessed that my husband agreed we should invest in one of better quality. We were double blessed that Menards was having a nice sale on kitchen faucets! We were able to pick up our new faucet at quite a steep discount!

 

The faucet itself is higher up than the one that we replaced. This will make filling the watering cans, canning pots, and other pots and pans much, much easier. I also took the time to remove what was left of the old, moldy and disintegrating caulk with some nice, new caulk. No more leaks and a nice finish to the faucet. 

Now that we have recognized that I really like the oiled bronze finish, we are going to slowly integrate it into the house as we update, repair, and replace different things. So what types of finishes do you like or have you found that you use in your house on a regular basis?

Redistribution of Wealth

We have been very busy this past weekend redistributing the "wealth" of previous owners. When we took down all the "added" walls to the house, this left us with a huge pile of wood. By huge, I mean the pile was wider than me and almost as tall.  The longest boards measured over 80" and consisted mostly of 2 x 4s and 2 x 2s. So, we redistributed this wealth of wood into a new pantry...with a lot more space!

This blank wall now features a wonderful set of shelves and a beautiful curtain! (Thanks mom for the apple tree fabric....it is perfect for the pantry!).

Much better! The best part of the whole project was that it cost us four boxes of wood screws. That's it!

Previously, we had a couple of old shelves to use, but these were starting to bow pretty badly and I was concerned about all the weight on them. In addition to the shelves, we had re-purposed a bakers rack to try and store everything. This worked for a while, but now we have room to expand.

We have designated this area for the home canned vegetables. Previously, some of these had to be split onto different shelves and on different sides of the pantry just to contain it all. Each shelf can hold 56 jars of goodies. A huge improvement....so I can definitely plan on canning even more this coming summer!

This nine-cubicle storage unit has also been replaced with more custom shelves, thanks to my wonderful husband! And while the gray shelving worked for a while, they simply did not provide us with enough space and resulted in a lot of "dead" space above. All of this is now fixed!

All of the canning shelves measure approximately 8" high, which is perfect for all sizes of canning jars. We decided to divide the canned fruit section into two so that I could store all of the jams, butters and preserves together and all the syrups and processed fruits together. All of the shelves consist of four boards, with some spacing in between each to ensure good air flow.

The bulk of the original shelves were on this wall, but the spacing did not work really well for us. We did the best we could with what we had, but I like my new shelves so much better. I now have plenty of room to stock up on what I consider to be staples for any pantry.

All the way around the pantry, we started the first set of shelves approximately 20" from the ground. This allows us to store rolling carts, like you see above, as well as some wine and whiskey half-barrels for long term root storage. I am hoping to order a few of those over the summer. It also gives us plenty of room to store water and so much more.

The final wall was originally empty and so we had used some more gray shelving to hold the additional canned jars that I processed this summer. As you can see, just about every square inch of available space was full and I did not know where I was going to expand to when I went shopping this month. Believe it or not, we were starting to scrape the bottom of the wood pile once we got to this wall. Anxious to finish it up and surprise me, my wonderful husband worked late into the early morning hours....

I now have everything categorized and every food item not only has its own place, but I have room to add to some essentials. I am hoping to buy some more "pretty" boxes or baskets for the top shelves and a few other things, but for now, this space is finished and I love it!

Our redistribution did not stop there. Oh, no it did not. My wonderful 18 month old daughter has learned to climb stairs. A feat that she is quite proud of herself for accomplishing. I have spent most of the last couple days running to the sound of an older sibling that "Harley is on the stairs!". As if that were not enough, our 5 month old black lab has decided that he likes it upstairs....regardless that it is forbidden territory for him! All of this has been solved by re-purposing the door that we removed when we took down the extra wall in the basement.

This is only temporary but it works. Someday we will have an original styled door, with beautifully stained trim and charming original hardware.  Someday. But today, I can rest easy and relax. For a moment. While I may not agree with the redistribution of wealth that our wonderful politicians like to speak about, I definitely like redistributing the "wealth" of previous owners!

My First Door

I decided that today was the day that I was going to start working on restoring the original doors that are in our house...the few that have not been replaced with hollow core doors, that is. My poor husband has a busy work week scheduled, with some really long days, so I wanted to find a project that I could work on with minimal assistance.

Currently, we have four original doors - three closet and one pantry. I thought that the best door to start with would be the door to the closet in the master bedroom.

I put some bubble wrap on top of the two sawhorses my wonderful husband built for me over Thanksgiving weekend. One of the many home renovation blogs I read recommended doing this to keep from scratching the other side. Once I set it up, I started working on removing the door knobs, back plate, and innards. I put the small screws in a sandwich ziplock bag, and put that bag and the door hardware into a larger freezer ziplock bag. Hopefully, this will keep them safe and together until I can clean them up.

I just love these door knobs. I have no idea if they are original to the house or not. I have read on some sites that the glass knobs were popular in the 1920s, but what makes me suspicious is how bright and brassy the backside of the knob is. I haven't decided yet what to do about them, especially since I love the "bling" for the door!

I don't know what the interior part of the door knob is called that holds the knob and they keyhole, but it sure was tight...really tight. I struggled quite a bit to get it to slide out of the door. But I eventually got it, as you can see.

Scraping the paint off the door has been a lot easier than I anticipated. Apparently, these have only been painted once or twice. And whomever decided to paint it initially never bothered to remove the original finish. This means that the heat gun bubbles it up and the scraper takes it right off. No elbow grease required. The only real challenge is in the framing of the panels. These are very narrow and curved, as you can see in the panel on the right. However, I found a method that appears to be working quite well...

I found that if I heat the paint up with the heat gun just enough to make it warm, I can pull it off with my fingers. It comes off in really long strips. The trick is to get it soft enough to remove but no so hot as to burn my fingertips!

So far, the door is absolutely beautiful with a warm, red sheen to it and some grain. I am planning on following another blogger's process of removing the paint with a heat gun, then removing the original finish and paint remnants with stripper and steel wool. Then sand it three times and seal the whole thing with shellack. It will be my first time using shellack, but the results I have seen on other sites makes me really want to test it out. I will be sure to keep you posted, but for now, back to scraping!