If there’s one thing we’ve made clear about our new house, it’s that we’re not thrilled with the trim colors.
Somewhere between the Williamsburg Blue and the Muddy Mauve, our feelings about painting swung between nervous excitement and mild dread.
With all the carpet removed and before the new hardwoods were installed, we decided it was the perfect time to tackle the upstairs trim — and the doors. Sixteen doors, to be exact. We removed each door and took off the hardware to make painting easier.
Facing four bedrooms, closets, a long hallway, and nine windows with lots of mullions, we realized this was a job that justified a paint sprayer. After a recommendation from friends, we bought a Graco TrueCoat II on sale at Lowe’s. Since then, we’ve tried a different Wagner model with good results, but initially we picked up the Graco because we knew there was still plenty of painting to do in the house beyond this project. Buying the sprayer made sense compared to renting since we’ll use it repeatedly as we move from room to room — there’s still lots of blue trim downstairs.
The sprayer turned out to be simpler than expected: essentially a plastic cup attached to a gun that plugs in. Setup was minimal, though we read the instructions twice to avoid mistakes. Then we started priming.
Cleanup with a sprayer can be a hassle, so we used a disposable bag in the paint cup to keep things tidy and reduce post-job cleaning time.
We don’t have many process photos because one of us watched Clara downstairs while the other painted. The work moved quickly: we could run a room’s baseboards in 10 to 15 minutes, most of that time spent refilling the paint cup.
Spraying is definitely faster, but it uses more paint. I could usually get through about two sides of a door before refilling. Watching the old blue disappear with each pass was incredibly satisfying. Spraying may seem wasteful, but it provides heavier coverage — a single spray pass often equals two brushed coats in terms of coverage.
We’ll share a more detailed sprayer guide once we’ve logged more hours with it, but for now we’re still getting comfortable. Our main challenge is resisting the urge to go back and touch up small missed spots, because over-spraying easily creates drips.
Move slowly and avoid double-spraying, and the finish is impressively smooth — almost factory-quality.
We chose to paint the windows by hand rather than risk overspray and drips on all the glass panes. In hindsight, hand-painting may not have been the faster option: scraping paint off glass with a razor and applying multiple coats proved time-consuming. Each formerly blue or mauve window needed one primer coat and three paint coats when done by hand.
Overall, spraying took two mornings — one for primer and one for paint — but we made several trips back to hand-paint windows and other tricky spots. The cumulative effect is dramatic, and the photos show the difference even though I’ve lost track of which day they were taken.
We didn’t tape off walls or floors around sprayed areas except for a few close outlets and vents. That means the walls will need repainting, too, but that’s a separate project for later.
Some rooms, like the guest room and our master, already had cream trim and doors, so they didn’t need primer. Because roughly 30% of the trim was already cream, the entire job required only two gallons of primer.
For the white paint we used Benjamin Moore’s Ultra Spec in Simply White, semi-gloss. This contractor-grade, low-VOC paint was recommended to us and is more affordable than some other Benjamin Moore lines we’ve used. It cost around $36 per gallon at our local paint store, which made buying a five-gallon bucket easier on the wallet.
To choose the color, we brought home about ten white swatches and taped them up together. Some leaned yellow, others felt too blue, and Simply White looked clear and crisp without being too warm or too cool. It’ll look even better once we repaint the yellowed walls and ceilings.
Our total spending for four rooms and closets, nine windows, sixteen doors, and a long hallway was:
- Paint sprayer: $180
- Primer, 2 gallons: $36 (on sale)
- Paint, 5 gallons: $180 (we still have half a gallon left)
- TOTAL: $396
It’s more than we expected, but because we needed to get the new floors in before moving, the speed of spraying felt worth it. Now that we own the sprayer, the cost will amortize over many more jobs as we finish the rest of the house’s trim.
Next up: rehanging the doors after replacing some worn brass hardware, then installing the hardwoods. We considered doing more painting while the subfloor is exposed — walls, ceilings, closet interiors — but the move date is looming (about two weeks away). We can live with unpainted walls for a little while, but moving in without finished floors felt riskier. Luckily, we’ve painted rooms with finished hardwoods before, so we know we can tackle walls and ceilings after the floors go in.
That’s what we’ve been up to lately. How about you?