“I’m Blue Da Ba Dee Dabba Da-eeeeee” (anyone else remember that song?). Imagine us belting it out while priming and painting trim for days on end. We’re getting a little loopy, but we’re having fun. Feel free to hum along if you need encouragement.
Last you heard, our foyer was sporting some intense blue trim.
We stripped all the wallpaper and removed two closet doors and the bathroom door so we could bring them out to the garage and use our paint sprayer to apply a coat of primer plus two coats of white semi-gloss paint.
Our sprayer has been especially helpful in two main situations:
- When we can remove an item and lay it on a drop cloth to spray—doors, cabinet doors, and trim before installation.
- When we don’t have to tape off lots of surrounding spaces—like when we removed upstairs carpet and could spray trim and doors without worrying about protecting floors.
We still prefer rolling walls and ceilings; sprayers are best for trim, doors, cabinets, and furniture—things you wouldn’t typically spray paint on a wall, but that benefit from a sprayed finish.
We learned by doing: moving the sprayer a bit faster helped produce a smoother finish and reduced drips.
The model we used originally (a Graco True Coat II) offered strong coverage and didn’t require thinning the paint. We’ve since switched to another model with similar benefits. The main advantages we noticed were:
- Excellent coverage—paint goes on thicker and smoother than with a brush or roller, speeding up the overall process.
- No need to thin the paint—some sprayers require this, so not having to fuss with dilution is convenient.
On the flip side, the drawbacks include:
- Overspray—sprayers are less controlled than rollers or brushes, so you’ll get paint beyond the target surface (you can see this on the drop cloth behind the doors).
- A learning curve—controlling the sprayer to avoid drips takes practice. Spray quickly and avoid holding the nozzle too close to the surface.
While the doors were in the garage getting sprayed, we primed and painted the rest of the foyer trim by hand.
Removing all the baseboards, chair rail, crown, and trim around seven doorways would have been a massive job, so we opted to prime and paint the trim in place. Taping off the many adjoining rooms (kitchen, dining room, office, portico, closets, bathroom) to spray would have taken far longer than hand-painting.
We applied two coats of primer to all the blue baseboard, trim, chair rail, and crown, then followed with two topcoats. That made four total coats in this case, because we were covering a saturated blue. Here’s my exhausted-but-determined priming face.
If your trim is glossy or stained wood, rough it up with sandpaper and use a liquid deglosser before priming and painting; raw wood should get a stain-blocking primer. Our trim was matte and chalky, so we skipped sanding and deglossing and moved straight to primer and semi-gloss paint.
We used Benjamin Moore’s Simply White in semi-gloss for trim and doors to match the rest of the house. The number of coats needed always depends on the starting color and surface condition; in our case, four coats produced a clean, crisp result.
Once everything dried, we rehung the doors and installed new knobs to match those upstairs.
We still need to paint the back of the front door the same teal as its front and decide whether to ebonize the stair railing and paint the spindles white, but even without those details the foyer feels much lighter and more open now that the blue trim is gone.
Here’s the before shot from the other side.
And here’s the after with white trim and doors. With the blue trim gone, the slate looks less intensely blue—the reflective cast from the trim made it read bluer before. Now the slate reads more neutral, with just subtle blue undertones.
Though the stairs are still on the to-do list, the foyer is inching toward a fresher, brighter look. We’re excited to tackle the yellowed walls next.
Don’t worry—blue trim isn’t gone from our lives yet. Our office and dining room still have blue window trim, baseboards, crown molding, and built-ins, so there’s a good chance you’ll read about more blue-paint adventures in the future. For now, we’ll keep softly crying into our paint brushes while enjoying the glossy white payoff.
Psst—on a personal note, we also shared how we spent the Fourth of July and how we celebrated our sixth anniversary.