To be fair to Mick Jagger & Co., I’d ACTUALLY like to paint it black.  All over the blogosphere, there is an ever-growing love of black interior doors.  It certainly adds sophistication to the plain white door and can undoubtedly make your hardware pop.

Like the classic little black dress, the black interior door has rightly become the must-have for the fashionable home.

In our home, however, there are two furry problems to having black doors in my living and dining rooms:

Exhibit A:  Senna
Exhibit B:  Pablo

Thanks to these two, I can’t paint my doors black because we need to install a cat flap into one of the dining room doors that goes into the cellar, as this is where their food and litter tray live.  Unfortunately for me, the only cat flaps you can buy in UK (from my own possibly-flawed research) are either white or brown.  Admittedly, cat flaps aren’t the most stunning door hardware but sometimes we have to step away from aesthetics and look at practicality.  Either we leave the doors open all the time to the cellar, or we install a cat flap.

So the cat flap, in it’s infinite practicality, has won.

The two doors in my dining room are pretty horrible.

The door to the cellar where we will install a cat flap.
The door that leads to the hallway.

How the previous owners lived with them in their scratched up glory with one brown doorknob and one white doorknob, is beyond me.  In the short 7 weeks we’ve been here, they have been an itch that had to be scratched.  It was my hope that a bit of primer and a coat of white glossy paint will transform them into something less like a terrible blemish (especially as every other door in the house has already been painted white, strangely) and more like Britney Spears’ photoshopped thighs.

As I’ve mentioned in this post, I bought these beauties to go on the doors and have banished the wood knobs to the rubbish bin:

We’ve done a bit of work this weekend, namely removing the offending door knobs, filling in the holes left by the old hardware, sanding & wiping down the doors, applying primer and then applying a single coat of glossy white.

Unfortunately, despite our best intentions, all of the imperfections on the doors have risen to the surface with their bright shiny new coat.  Which means this week, we will mostly be filling, sanding, priming and painting AGAIN.  I suppose these are the lessons you learn.

Hopefully, by next weekend, the gorgeous hardware will go on and I can show you my born again doors.

Perhaps someday, when they come up with a black cat flap, I will paint them black.

Until then, Cat Flap Manufacturers, if you are listening, THE INTERWEB HAS SPOKEN!

Black Door Photo credits:  1.  High Street Market  2. Living Etc 3.  Lavender & Lilies


Pin It on Pinterest