Spray it LeBron James or Oil Rubbed Bronze ... whichever

So, last Friday, some of our friends were milling around the kitchen and we showed them one of our tinker projects, which is spray painting dated fixtures. At one point, I misheard my friend say, "You could Lebron James it," while gesturing at our fridge.

totalsports.com

Yeah, I misheard. The rough translation was painting the fridge with something like the bronze spray (not spraying the basketball player on our fridge, or even oil-rubbed bronze, just Rustoleum spray paint). Confused yet?

Basically, if you believe everything you see on Pinterest and DIY blogs, Rustoleum's oil rubbed bronze is the Jesus of spray paints. Got a brass fixture but can't afford a new a chandelier? ORB IT!

People have even ORB'd their sink and tub faucets and shower stalls.

Style with Cents does a nice breakdown of what has staying power and what you're better off just replacing.

We have a long ways to go before we even consider ORBing faucets, so we started with some basics: Our laundry room & kitchen pulls. Our original pulls are dated, though they do feel nice and solid in your hand.

The funny thing is, we've seen these pulls in stores while looking for "contemporary" pieces. But I guess if you're going for the antique look, that'd be the way to go. Since our kitchen updates will be gradually phased in (unless Kitchen Crashers wants to jump in here), we figured orbing these suckers might make for a nice holdover until we suck it up and buy 30 pulls at $2-5 a pop.

Our poor laundry room  is actually the DIY lab. It's often a disaster staging ground, but it's also where we first tried painting trim, and we figured it would also be the first cabinets we paint. There's less heartache when you mess up in the laundry room, because our machines Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum sing happy little tunes, which would perk any cabinet up. Seriously, our washer and dryer are the happiest appliances we've ever met!

So, I removed the pulls from the laundry, since they were the same, and when a warm enough day hit, I put them in a box, went out to the patio, and sprayed away. The can said to wait an hour between coats. Even after they dry, you need to let them cure, or you'll nick the paint off. 

Btw, how not awesome is the counter top? It looks better here than in real life.

I'd read in a few different blogs that you're best off using a primer or sealer coat, even though Rustoleum's metallic line is supposed to adhere to any surface (except, you know, liquids). I grabbed a can of Valspar's clear sealer, but it made the pieces look more like iron than oil rubbed bronze.

To test things out, we put some of the sprayed pulls onto the kitchen cabinets to compare.

We weren't thrilled with the results. It's definitely a shape issue, though I feel like the orb'd pulls darken the space. Here's a comparison shot for you, with the orb around the microwave and original pulls to the left and on the lower cabinets.

What do you think? Is it even worth going through this holdover step?

In the half bath, which we have not fully revealed yet, since we have some trim work left to do, and we're hoping to do a couple more tweaks, we managed to snag a really nice hardware set from CostCo. The old brass light just wasn't going to work with the new brushed nickel set, so since we liked how the orb had turned out, even if we weren't sure if we liked it with this shape and cabinet stain, we decided to spray a couple pulls and see how it looked.

The photo is a first coat, but even with additional coats, we said NOPE. The nickel just looked odd, since it was speckled and not brushed. The orb paint could get away with it, but not the nickel. The NO element was evident on the half bath's light fixture. It might look cool black, but since we already found a cool replacement, we're not exploring that route.

Because the spray nickel pulls didn't work, we decided to go ahead and get some nice ones for the half bath vanity, since it only needed two.

For giggles, we put one on a kitchen cabinet and immediately decided that the nickel pulls aren't going to work with our stain. They might work down the road, but as we are still debating what to do with the cabinets, we aren't ready to buy 30 pulls. We do, however, really like the form and feel of this one, since it strikes a nice balance between modern and traditional details. We're hoping to score a pack of similar ones with a different finish. We like orb, it just seemed to make the stain darker. But was it the form or the color? And should we just wait until we figure out what the heck to do with the cabinets?

The other conundrum is starting to surface, too. Once you get two new pulls on one set of cabinets, suddenly your other ones feel weird. Mike figured it out first: We really dislike the feel of pulls that are hollowed out in the back. We want solid pulls. Our current ones are solid, feel good to grip, they just aren't our style. I'm going to orb the pulls in the master bath, but they are hollowed out and now starting to bug us even more.

It's easy to see why home ownership spurs the economy, even if you're dragged down in debt. It's not roofs, furnaces, plumbing, all that maintenance drudgery. It's the silly things like the feel of a handle on a door you really could open without it.