If there’s one thing we made clear about our new house, it’s that the existing trim colors were not our favorite.
Somewhere between Williamsburg Blue and Muddy Mauve, we started to get both excited and a little nervous about painting. With all the carpet removed and before the new hardwoods go in, the exposed subfloor made the perfect opportunity to tackle the upstairs trim — and the doors. Sixteen doors, to be exact. We removed them and took off the hardware to make painting much easier.
Painting trim for four bedrooms and closets, a long hallway, nine mullioned windows, and those sixteen doors felt like a job that warranted a paint sprayer. After hearing recommendations, we bought a Graco TrueCoat II on sale for $180 at Lowe’s. We chose to buy rather than rent because there’s still plenty to paint in the house — especially downstairs, where that blue trim waits.
The sprayer itself 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 carefully before starting. We began with a coat of primer.
Because cleanup is often the hardest part of using a sprayer, we used disposable bags in the paint cup to keep things tidier and reduce the amount of cleaning required afterward.
We don’t have a ton of process photos — one of us was downstairs with Clara while the other sprayed — but the work was fast. We could run baseboards in a room in about 10–15 minutes; most of that time was spent refilling the cup.
As many warned, spraying is much faster but uses more paint. We usually managed about two door sides per fill. It felt great to watch the blue vanish after each pass. The extra paint isn’t really waste — spraying often gives coverage equivalent to more than one brush coat in a single pass.
We’re still learning the sprayer, so a more detailed how-to will come later. Our biggest challenge so far is resisting the urge to over-spray spots we think we missed; it’s easy to create drips if you apply too much at once.
Go slow and avoid double spraying and the finish can be impressively smooth and factory-like.
We chose to hand-paint the windows rather than risk overspray on all those glass panes. In retrospect, that may not have been the fastest choice: hand-painting required scraping glass with a razor afterward and each blue/mauve window needed a coat of primer plus three coats of paint. It was a lot of time and elbow grease.
Spraying occupied two mornings — primer one day, paint the next — but we made multiple trips to touch up areas that couldn’t be sprayed. Despite the back-and-forth, the difference is dramatic.
We didn’t tape off walls or floors around most sprayed areas, except for a few close outlets and vents. That means the walls could use repainting, but that’s a separate project for another time.
Some rooms, like the guest room and our master, already had cream trim and doors, so they didn’t need primer. Overall we used two gallons of primer for the project — not bad for four rooms, four closets, nine windows, sixteen doors, and a long hallway.
We ended up using 4.5 gallons of white paint. In hindsight we should have bought a five-gallon bucket at the start, which would have saved a trip or two. Live and learn.
For paint we chose Benjamin Moore Ultra Spec in Simply White with a semi-gloss finish. It’s contractor-grade, No-VOC, and more affordable than some higher-end lines we’ve used before. Pricing at our local shop was about $36 per gallon, which made buying five gallons more reasonable.
To pick the right white, we brought home about ten swatches and taped them up together. Simply White looked clear and crisp without feeling too warm or too cool. It will read even better once the yellowed walls and ceilings get refreshed later.
Our budget for this upstairs trim refresh ended up as follows:
- Paint sprayer: $180
- Primer (2 gallons): $36
- Paint (5 gallons): $180 (we still have half a gallon left)
- Total: $396
It’s more than we initially expected, but since we needed to get floors installed before moving, the speed the sprayer provided was worth it. Now that we own the sprayer it will get used on many more projects around the house.
Next up: rehanging the doors after replacing some pitted brass hardware, then getting those hardwoods down. We debated painting walls and ceilings while the subfloor is exposed, but with move day approaching in two weeks we decided completed floors are the priority. We can live with unpainted walls and ceilings for a bit longer — hardwoods are harder to do once everything’s moved in.
So that’s what we’ve been up to lately. How about you?