railing project....

boy was this hard work!!  And sOOOo time consuming. I always read about how hard kitchen cabinets are but railings? No one warned me about these. At least with kitchen cabiniets you don't have to deal with a bunch of grooves.

So this is the before picture, not a pretty picture..in the next few months I will be transforming my ugly traditional living room into a cottage inspired room. In order to do that I had to do something with these railings...so what to do? Paint them white! That has been my answer for everything lately.

I think the most time cosuming part was priming. My daughter helped me sand them down but if you notice the little grooves in each railing..not a good thing, I started priming last weekend at 9:30 pm and did not get done until 2:30 am!  5 hours of priming!! I never saw that one coming.

This is the primer I use for everything..i might be repeating myself from the last post but I love how the fumes are low and it dries fast.

So then I start the painting and look what happend....DRIP MARKS! UGGRR I hate that.

The key is to do thin layers of paint...tonz of layers. And to use a roller brush each time. the first few coats I used a paint brush because i thought I needed to get a good heavy layer going but then that lead to an  uneven paint job.

Some of the railing look like I put clay on them?? it was getting pretty frustrating but I kept painting, sanding, painting, sanding.

I think I did 4-5 coats, I can't remember but it was a looong process and I really wanted to move on with my life, it had been a week that I was working on these so I told myself on the last coat that "this is it"  It has to look good and if its not perfect then that is okay.

And so here are the results...It's a big difference don't you think? it really freshens up the room. Now I just need to get those eye sores of couches out of my house. ...actually, I take that back, I don't want to hurt there feelings, these couches have been good to me however I don't think it would work if I painted them white so it's time for them to move on.

And here  is another view, those railings just look neglected before.

And then right here it looks like I brang them back to life!

So I wish I had some pro advice but I don't. The only thing I would have done diffferent is painted all the railings with a rolling brush the entire time instead of trying to get thick coats with the paint brush. It is better to  apply several light coats then a couple think coats....Oh yeah, i remember...the first few coats I would do the front of the railings then go on the other side and finish the back...well by the time I would get to the back there was drip marks that had already dried so what i started to do is just paint the front of 3-4 railings then walk around and do the back of those 3-4 railings..maybe that is a given but it wasn't for me.

Oh, and i used Valspar white paint..i didn't have them mix in a special color.

Now I gotta get rid of that blank frame....Actually, Im just going to paint it white!

Thanks for looking! hope I have inspired you to tackle your dingy old railings.

I'm linking up here, you will be amazed at all the inspiring projects!