Our house has a total of THIRTEEN louvered closet doors. What are louvered doors, you ask? They are shutter-like wood doors with horizontal slats, and small spaces in between the slats to allow for ventilation. They are great for small, closed-off spaces like closets that tend to get stuffy. They’re also very charming and characteristic of older homes.
As you all know, we’ve been gradually painting all of the dark wood in our house a clean, modern white. It’s really helped to make our 1600 square foot home feel brighter and more open. And so far, we’ve painted all of the wooden trim, window sashes, and doors by hand using brushes and rollers.
With louvered doors, painting by hand just seemed like too much work (count the number of individual slats on each door, multiply that by the number of coats of paint you’ll need – oh, and don’t forget about the back of the door). So, we invested in a paint sprayer to tackle this painting job (thanks to Young House Love for recommending their go-to paint sprayer). In case you’re wondering, we chose to purchase rather than rent a paint sprayer because we know our painting days are far from over, and we’ll use it again on future projects. Buying a paint sprayer to update our existing doors actually saved us money, too! Brand new, white louvered doors sell for around $200 per door.
Removing the doors
To begin the project, we removed the doors from the closets. We painted four doors at a time to make the project more manageable – plus, we could only fit four doors in our garage at a time. For the doors on hinges, we simply unscrewed the door from the hinges, leaving the hinges attached to the door frame (less work for us when re-hanging the doors).
For the sliding closet doors, we completely unscrewed the doors from the rollers on the top of the door. Pete held the door (solid wood doors are heavy), and I loosened the screws until the door was released. Another option is to partially loosen the screws and then angle the doors to pop them out of the track, but we found that taking the rollers all the way off was easier (you’ll have to take them off for painting anyway).
Prepping the doors for paint
One thing about louvered doors is that all of the horizontal slats accumulate a lot of DUST. Our doors are fifty years old, and the previous owners used a wood-burning stove as their primary heat source (hello soot!). To clean the doors, we sprayed them down with a hose, and then followed our typical steps for prepping for paint. The prep process goes: clean, fill holes, sand, dust, tape, paint!
One of the sliding doors had a deep gauge from where it was dragging against the roller of the other door. We filled it with some spackle, let it dry, and sanded it smooth. This was the only sanding we had to do, since we used liquid deglosser to dull down the doors.
Painting the doors
Next came the fun part, spraying the doors with paint! In all honesty, we were a little bit nervous for this part since neither of us had operated a paint sprayer before. Our goal was to avoid spraying too much paint and creating drips at all cost. Our paint sprayer has a dial that lets you control how much paint you’re spraying, so if it seemed too heavy, we just dialed it back. For reference, we used the “6” setting the whole time (it uses a 1-10 scale).
We laid out the doors outside on a drop cloth, and propped them up with scrap pieces of wood underneath so they wouldn’t stick. We later removed one door from the set up after we started spraying and realized that we needed room to walk in between the doors. The picture below is after one coat of paint. Looking good already!
If you’re new to paint sprayers, they’re fun to use because they work FAST. It took us about a minute to spray one coat on a door (spraying one side at a time of course), and you’ll need fewer coats of paint than if you were hand-painting. We only had to spray two coats of paint to get full coverage! And we’re talking covering full-blown brown wood with white paint. After the paint dried and cured on one side of the doors, we flipped them over and repeated the process by spraying two coats on the other side.
Just so you know, the reason why you get great coverage using a paint sprayer is because it uses more paint than traditional painting. If I had to estimate, I would say that one coat with a paint sprayer is like two coats of painting with a brush/roller, plus there will be some unavoidable overspray. We weren’t prepared for how much paint we would end up using, so we had to make an extra trip to Home Depot for another gallon of paint. In our opinion, the amount of time and effort we saved was WELL worth the extra paint cost.
Tips for painting with a paint sprayer
For those of you who are planning to use a paint sprayer to tackle a project of your own, here are some tips for using a paint sprayer:
- Read the instructions for your particular paint sprayer. For example, ours did NOT require us to thin the paint with water.
- Test your paint sprayer first. We test-sprayed a scrap piece of wood to make sure we liked the sprayer settings.
- Always keep the spray gun moving! Spraying for too long in one spot will create drips.
- Don’t get too close. We kept the spray gun roughly 2 feet away from the doors when painting (closer = heavier paint spray, farther = lighter paint spray).
- If possible, paint with a partner. It was nice to have one person painting, and the other moving the paint sprayer as we moved around the garage or refilling the paint container as needed.
- Check the weather before painting. Clear, sunny, and low humidity is best! For us, one coat of paint took ~1 hour to dry on a sunny day. We made the mistake of painting on a very humid day, and the paint took SEVERAL hours to dry.
Of course this list could go on further if we talked about spraying technique and so on! You’ll master your spraying technique once you try it, it’s pretty fun and easy. Just keep the spray gun level, and don’t spray too much at once. It’s better to paint light, even coats, rather than heavy coats that might drip.
The finished doors!
Now that you know the process we used for painting our louvered doors, it’s time for some after pictures! Everyone’s favorite part, right?!
The paint color we used to paint the doors (and all of the trim in our house) is Ultra Pure White by Behr. You can see a full breakdown of our house’s paint colors here. The bright white makes our rooms feel bigger and newer, since white reflects light rather than absorbing it like the dark wood.
This is our hallway in 2016 vs. 2020! While we still have a few more louvered doors to spray to knock out all 13 of them, we’re pretty pumped about how these ones turned out. Here’s the cost breakdown for this project:
- Paint sprayer – $129
- Three gallons of semi-gloss paint ($37 per gallon) – $111
- Dropcloths, scrap wood – free (had on hand)
- Miscellaneous prep supplies: screwdriver, Dawn soap, spackle, sanding sponge, painter’s tape – free (had on hand)
TOTAL COST: $240
*Again, brand new, white louvered doors are ~$200 per door. Talk about DIY savings!
