Laura Ellis
Today I’m sharing the long awaited sliding closet door makeover from our office renovation. This sliding closet door makeover article contains affiliate links, but nothing that I wouldn’t recommend wholeheartedly.
I’ve also seen a few bloggers tackle sliding closet door makeovers by painting the metal frames. So when I looked at our outdated gold mirrored closet doors in our office I thought I’d combine these two ideas: I was very hesitant to share the sliding closet door makeover here on the blog as a tutorial because now that it’s all said and done I would probably do it differently. I always want to make sure the projects we teach you work well, so I was just not going to share a blog post for it because I wasn’t confident that it was the best way.
Con – Oil paint has more fumes This was one of main reasons that I decided to go with water based because the office doesn’t have any windows Con – Water based paint is cheaper But it’s not worth the extra savings if you’re looking something durable on metal
Pro – You’ll get best coverage in all the small spaces of the metal closet door frame by spraying Pro – Spraying is generally faster than brushing paint …But you have to keep in mind all of the extra time required to mask and tape everything off. You’ll see in the tutorial below that I cleaned the with rubbing alcohol before painting, but I should have probably also lightly sanded the surface with ultra fine grit sandpaper too! To help with the fumes and overspray issues, you could remove the closet doors and paint them outside.
If you love DIY videos, don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel! I started by cleaning the mirrors with Windex & using rubbing alcohol on the metal closet door frames with round cotton pads.
What I’d do differently here – As mentioned above, I’d start with lightly sanding the metal frame with ultra grit sandpaper first.
I didn’t bother painting the track on the bottom floor because it would just get scuffed up anyway and you can barely tell. I measured out equal parts on window, marked it with a level and dry erase marker and simply added black electrical tape to make the grid lines so the mirrors looked like a window. It was easiest to have the electrical tape of over the edge and then cut off the excess in a nice straight line with an Xacto knife.
So I wanted to be honest and share all of the things that I’d do differently I were to do this sliding closet door makeover again! By following my advice here on ways to change this tutorial for the better, I think you’ll be happy with your updated mirrored closet doors!
