Master Closet Update: It's All Painted!

Last week we finished putting up all the trim and getting things filled and sanded, and this week has been all about paint. As a reminder...

Kind of hard to look at, haha. Clutter, paint samples on the wall, wood floors mixed with wood shelves and wood baseboard and white baseboard and wood filler and holes in the wall for the electrical and this and that and the other. But we finished up the baseboards, cleared everything out, taped off the floor, window and doorway, and sprayed the entire room - trim, ceiling, cabinets - all of it.

The above picture is just primer and it's already a huge improvement. We used Zinsser Shellac primer, because it sticks to everything - including melamine IKEA cabinet boxes. That's what's good about this primer. The bad? It's extremely high VOC and toxic. Do not use this primer without a respirator mask! Not the easiest thing to find right now, for sure, but the fumes on this primer are no joke. Luckily we have a few heavy duty ventilator masks and goggles from past projects, otherwise there's no way we could have done this. But the primer was key, so the paint would adhere to the melamine without peeling off. So it could look like this:

Tell me that doesn't look incredible. We honestly could not be happier with it - the color is perfect, and it pulled the entire closet together just how we knew (and hoped) it would. The IKEA-ness of this closet disappeared, and it feels so custom and, thanks to the reinforcement of the trim we added, sturdy.

We used Farrow & Ball's Lamp Room Gray, and it's a total chameleon color. It breathes, and moves with the sun, which keeps everything from feeling bland and boring. (It's the same color we used on the trim in our adjacent master bedroom, so it really ties together the spaces) Here's the view from the window, showing how different the shades can be:

When you want a smooth, consistent finish, spraying is the way to go. We've tried half a dozen sprayers, but are huge fans of the Graco Airless sprayers. Specifically, the Graco Magnum Project Painter Plus (not sponsored). We swapped the default orange tip for the blue Graco RAC X with a 517 spray nozzle. The "5" in "517" represents the width of spray. Doubling that first digit gives you the coverage when the sprayer is held one foot away from the surface you're painting - so for this one, ten inches. the "17" is the rate of flow. For indoor paint, you'll usually use a 15 or 17 flow nozzle - the better the paint, the higher you'll go on that number. Farrow & Ball is a thicker, high-quality paint so the 517 was perfect. We've never had to thin any paint while using this sprayer--the same one we used for painting our kitchen cabinets last year and to paint our parents' exterior this weekend. It's gooooood.

That view - love it. Next for this room is making the custom drawer fronts, which will get painted in the same beautiful color. Then we can hang the chandelier, install the mirror (which is just sitting in our garage, begging to be mounted in place), and move our clothes in! But real quick, let's just see how the rug looks in here...

Oh yeah--now is the fun part!