White Paint + Man Cave

Can someone remind me why off-white doors are so common? You don't usually see off-white trim... so how do they expect it to match anything? Both this house and our first home (located on opposite coasts so it's not a regional thing) had the exact same hollow faux-wood or whatever they are doors, in OFF WHITE. Maybe they designed them specifically to match the "white" Ikea frames? Interesting. Anyway, builders/remodelers, please spend the extra few bucks or whatever per door and just get it in white.

Luckily, our last house only had a few doors (literally... there was 3 in the whole house, it was that small), so repainting them all one by one was a pain but it didn't drive us completely nuts. And even luckier, someone at least made an attempt to repaint all the doors in the current house to white. But apparently they forgot doors usually have a backside to them, like this one in the office:

Yeah, that had to go. A few coats later with white paint+primer and my favorite foam roller brush:

*Enter sigh of relief here*. Actually I shouldn't say that just yet, because they also forgot the inside of our master closet door... which I'll get to one day (along with spray painting all the hinges ORB to match the handles! Gold star for you if you caught that)

While I had the paint out, I went ahead and fixed this shelving gap in the Man Cave:

These are two Ribba ledge shelves from Ikea. I wanted one long piece to stretch across the wall, so the closest thing was to get two and line them up. As you can see from this picture, we sucked at mounting them and were left with an unsightly gap. In case you're wondering, the eyeball thing to the left is the screw hole, and the round stickers Ikea gives you to "conceal" it. I wasn't too concerned with it though because they'll be hidden by pictures.

So, I whipped out my Patch & Paint to fill the gap. You can see how it ended up looking below...

No, the shelves aren't curved... it's just my lens!

Not that great, I know. The edges actually lined up quite well in the back, but one shelf stuck out a smidge further than the other in the front, making it difficult to make a smooth transition. I thought about using caulk, but you can't sand it down smooth.

Instead, I slathered on a ton of the patch & paint, waited an hour or so for it to dry, and was able to very gently sand it down, to create a smooth slope from one edge to the other. Then I painted the entire shelf a nice bright white.

Here's an after shot where the two shelves meet...

You can see an idea of where it used to be (I wasn't using the best tools for the job, i.e. too low grit sandpaper, crappy paint brush, wrong type of spackle)... but really it's hardly noticable in person. If I didn't point it out, I swear no one would ever know.

Even the screw dots look much better!

Here's the wide shot:

And *drumroll*... here's the first post move-in shot of the Man Cave. I need to fill those frames with some custom art (I set emtpy ones there now to get an idea of the setup), and soon I plan on refinishing that wooden side table and painting it white.

We're going with a grey-white-beige palette for the room. More to come as it's slowly completed!

And I'm counting down the hours until Saturday when our Ikea furniture will arrive. Soon I'll be relaxing on this:

So excited... Hurry up and get here weekend!!!