Ding Dong

Happy Summer!!!  We have just one day of school left (a Teacher Day), so I got started on my summer projects on Saturday.  Here's two:

One of the first things I noticed about my house is was the doorbell.  Crooked...yellowed...rusty... yet somehow not my thing:

Since the doorknob and deadbolt are brushed chrome, I wanted something of a similar hue.  Lowe's didn't have much in the way of brushed chrome selection (at least not in my price range), so I ended up buying a silver-tone one.  After turning off the power to my porch (I didn't fancy getting knocked on my butt just to pretty up my house), it was just a matter of unscrewing the top screws, disconnecting the wires from the old bell, and then connecting them to the new bell, and reattaching the new bell to the house.  Voila!  

While at Lowe's, I also picked up some Valspar silver spray paint.  It was under $5 and my intention is to use it on the dining room chandelier.  However, that is currently stuck on my ceiling so until it detaches itself, I thought I would use it to give the kickplate a makeover...

...because the second thing I noticed when I first saw this house was this brass kickplate:

Yowza.  Funny story - the bottom left corner was not screwed in.  There wasn't even a hole for the screw!  This happens a lot in my house.  I think the builders were lazy.  

Anyway, three coats of the spraypaint - dry to the touch between coats.  Totally dry in about an hour.  

The screws were brassy, too, so I decided they needed a paint job as well.  To keep the screws stable as I sprayed the heads, I poked them into a paper-towel roll covered in foil.  The foil was not to protect the paper-towel roll (I'm not that weird), it was so the roll wouldn't...well...roll.  In the picture below, there are only ten screws... if you're counting you know there should be eleven (#12 never being installed).  I found the missing little guy on the porch and poked him into the other end later.  

Once everyone was dry, I removed the painted screws by unscrewing them (they wouldn't just pull out)...

...and reattached the "new" kickplate to the door:

 

I think it looks pretty snazzy!  Although in this picture, the peaking-out doorknob looks brassy.  :D

What have you spray-painted new life into?