D-I-WHY?

We have a list of stuff we want to do in/around the current house. One of the easier, cheaper things was ORB-ing the brass doorknobs.

So I poured over the Young House Love post which inspired the whole idea. We made two trips to Home Depot (because there is an actual law that, no matter how simple the task, it will require at least two separate trips to Home Depot), and away we went.

Step 1: Le Before Photo

Sassabrass

Step 2: Jonathan removed the knobs and related hardware. How many knobs do we have in our house, you ask? 25. Plus three deadbolts.

Shiny

Step 3: Sanding all surfaces with 400-grit sandpaper. Even with a trusty sidekick, this step took FOREVER.

She was interested in sanding for about five minutes. I handled the other eleventy billion minutes. 

Some were tough to sand, like the outside knobs that have a nice thick layer of dirt and ick on them. Jonathan helped with some elbow grease on the ones I couldn't get smooth. 

All brass and no shine. 

You might notice that we were also sanding and prepping the strikeplates. This goes against the Young House Love recommendation, but I couldn't find ORB strikeplates when I was at Home Depot and there was no way I was going to make a third trip. I figured we'd just spray them and if it scraped off, so be it. (It has scraped off, at least a bit, on most of the plates already. So it bees.)

Step 4: Rubbing down all knobs and such with a liquid deglosser. No photos of that. It was pretty simple.

Step 5: Spray time! I used the Rust-Oleum ORB and it worked really well. It took... I don't even know how many coats. I used two full cans of paint, which I think is a lot? But I tend to waste paint when I spray because I'm always afraid to get too close.

Getting better

I remembered to put the keys in the locks so they wouldn't get gummed up with paint! Hooray.

Here are some notes on Step 5, if you're planning to try this at home. If it starts raining while your knobs are outside drying, so you decide to bring them inside, don't put them on newspaper on your kitchen table. Because then you'll have newspaper fibers stuck to the knobs wherever they touched the paper. And you'll try to scrape it off and then you'll have to paint them again.

Step 6: Let them dry before you re-install. We NAILED this step. Jonathan replaced the deadbolts just a few hours after painting, because we had somewhere to go and needed something to keep the doors closed. Did we leave the house with no doorknobs, and just deadbolts? Yes indeed, we did. Within a few days, he put the outside knobs back on so at least we had knobs and locks on those doors. (Yes, I said days. And if you believe what you hear about our fair city, you'd be shocked we're not dead by now. But we grew up in Wichita so we're not scurred.) Anyway. Adrian came over to watch the kids one night and he put a knob on the bathroom. And a week or so later, Jonathan replaced the rest of the knobs. So our knobs had, like, weeks to dry before being put in regular use.

Step 7: Decide what to do about the 4 knobs you forgot. We failed to notice the knobs on a closet, and on the outside door from the garage. By the time we noticed, I'd thrown away the worn-out sandpaper and I was out of paint. I could go back to Home Depot for a third time, but now it's like some kind of stand-off between me and HD and I'm not going to go. I'm going to live with my four brass knobs.

Step 8: Le after photo. Ummm, I should probably take one of those. Maybe when it's really, really done, when those last knobs are ORBed.

So, that's how you take what John and Sherry can do in like a day from start to finish, and make it take a month. I still love them, but I'm thinking that I'll have to keep this multiplier in mind whenever they give a time estimate for their projects. (Reminds me of Martha and her Everyday Food time estimates. Oh, Martha can make a fancy-pants dinner in 30 minutes? I'll go ahead and allot the entire day.)

But the knobs do look so good.