Navy Big Bang Theory Inspired Door

I present to you, our navy Big Bang Theory inspired door:

I'm in love :)

I started painting the door late at night:

Let me back up for a second. Before I even bought the paint, I tested my door to see if the builder had previously painted it with oil-based paint or latex based paint.

How do you test your paint? Dip a cotton ball in some denatured alcohol and rub it on your door.

If the paint comes off onto the cotton ball and the door feels tacky when you run your hand over the spot you rubbed with the alcohol, it's latex based paint. This means you can paint over your door with either oil-based paint or latex paint without having to prime it first. Hooray!

If the paint doesn't come off onto the cotton ball and the door doesn't feel any different when you run your hand over it, you're working with oil-based paint. This means you're going to have to prime your door first with oil-based primer because you can't paint over oil-based paint with latex paint – it simply won't stick. If you go ahead and try to paint it anyway, it'll peel right off. Womp, womp.

Allison's experience scared me so much that I ended up testing my door in a few places just to make sure that I knew what I was working with (latex paint)!

Anyway, back to my door. The first coat of paint looked kind of okay until I saw it in the daylight:

Yikes! The first coat is always the worst so I tried not to worry too much. I sanded the door down with a fine sanding block and then wiped it down with a damp rag. I waited until the door was dry (about 30 minutes) before applying another coat of paint.

I'll admit that painting around all of the studs was no fun. I thought about painting the entire door before gluing them on but I hadn't decided on a color at that point. It's probably a good thing I didn't though since some of the wood glue seeped out from under some of the studs and if I had painted the door ahead of time, I still would have needed to do touch ups. Six of one, half a dozen of the other I guess.

I ended up doing 4 coats of paint:

The finish isn't perfect but it's about as good as I can get it using a brush and a roller. I'm bummed that you can still see some roller marks even though I added Floetrol to my gallon of paint – Valspar's "Indigo Streamer" in semi-gloss.

I plan on investing in a paint sprayer one of these days and when that time comes, I'll sand the door down really well, remove the hardware, take it down from it's hinges, bring it into the garage and add a finishing coat to it. I can't wait for that day :)

I'm really glad I went with navy because it is gorgeous!

It compliments the colors in the artwork better than I expected. It's also really dark so it kind of looks black until your eyes adjust and realize it's actually blue. Maybe I just have bad eyes haha

Everyone likes a before and after, right?

Not bad for $10 worth of wooden studs and a weekend of painting!

Want to make a Big Bang Theory door of your own? Click here for the full DIY tutorial :)

What do you think of the transformation? Was it worth the wait to see the after photos? Are you as impressed as I am?

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