I have to admit that letting commenters choose the door color for the back entry of my studio was a very fun social experiment for me. Tallying the votes took a while, but my mom and I sat in Rosa’s Cafe yesterday afternoon and tallied the votes that had come in to that point.

It was so fascinating to see that there were three very clear crowd favorites. They were the eggplant, dark green, and the wall color.

Those three pretty much stayed neck and neck the whole time. And while I didn’t do a separate count for this, it seemed to me like most people who voted for the wall color also suggested that I paint the trim around the doors the wall color as well so that those doors would pretty much disappear, leaving the French doors and the colorful floral curtains as the focal point of the back entry. So it would look more like this…

To be quite honest, I don’t know that I could have done that for two reasons. First, painting trim, walls, and doors all the same color is a look that I always love seeing in photos and in other people’s homes, but I don’t like it in my own home. I think I tried it once (although now, I can’t remember where I tried it, but I feel certain that I did try it somewhere), and I just couldn’t get on board with it.

But the second reason is that every time I’ve seen that done, all of the walls, trim, and doors in a room are painted the same color. So if the trim around the two doors is painted the wall color, then the baseboards would also need to be painted the wall color, as would the trim around the French doors, and also the trim around the cased opening. All of it would need to be green.

Otherwise, I’m left with awkward stops and starts where visually the white baseboards would seem to randomly end and then start again. White baseboards only make sense if the door trim is also white. And green door trim only makes sense if the baseboards and the rest of the trim is green. So since I want my French door trim to be white, I just think all of the trim needs to be white.

Anyway, back to the vote. What really fascinated me was that when I wrote my post yesterday morning with all six door color options (which you can see here if you missed it), I really, genuinely thought that I didn’t have a preference. I thought that I would be happy with any of the six colors, and I was fully prepared to go today and purchase whichever color was the crowd favorite.

But as the voting and the tallying went on, I realized that I actually did have a favorite. For a while, the light green (wall color) was pulling ahead, and it seemed like it might end up being the winner…and I found myself being disappointed. What I found was that I was cheering on two specific colors — the eggplant and the dark green.

So I guess if you have a decision to make, and you genuinely think you don’t have a preference, give the decision making over to someone else. You may realize that you actually do have a preference!

In the end, the color that I realized was my favorite ended up being the crowd favorite as well. I’ll tell you the winner, but first, just a few points about the vote tally. In total, I counted 686 votes, including the blog comments as well as the comments on my A2D Facebook posts. Each person only got one vote, so if you listed more than one color, I only counted your first choice. If you said something like “Behr Cracked Pepper” (which wasn’t specifically an option), the vote went to the closest option. So in that specific example, the vote went to the dark charcoal gray. And finally, I cut the votes off at 9:30am this morning. There had to be an ending point. I can’t count votes indefinitely because at some point, I actually have to buy the paint and get the job done. 🙂

So out of 686 votes, the clear winner, with 207 votes, is the dark eggplant (like Behr Black Sapphire).

YAY!!! It didn’t take me long to realize that eggplant was my favorite, and I was cheering it on the whole way. When it would fall behind, I’d get worried. 😀 When it would pull ahead, I’d get excited.

The poor pinks didn’t do well at all. The cabinet color managed to get 58 votes, but the sad little light pink only got a total of 16 votes.

I don’t know why, but of the two pinks, I expected the light pink to get more votes. Although, my mom seemed to think I was a little bit crazy for even considering the light pink at all. 😀 I liked it, though! And I do think that in the whole scheme of things, seeing the whole room together, light pink doors would have been nice.

But I’m glad that the eggplant color won. I’m off to buy some eggplant-colored paint today, and I’ll see just how much progress I can make on getting these doors painted so that I can finally free my mind of this project and move on to something fun, like installing the wallpaper in the bathroom. That’s what I’d really like to be doing today! But I’m saving that as a reward for myself for finishing a job that I really don’t want to do. Sometimes that’s the only way I can motivate myself to get through the projects that I’m not looking forward to.

Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.

Charming Homes in Autumn

Which fall house is your favorite? The first two in this post were our real life homes (ours and my parents) but I would be very happy in any of these.

We have so many sweet memories in this cozy little English cottage where we lived happily for years with all three of our kids.

Such a sweet time it was to push a stroller and ride bikes with them through the fallen leaves to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. I miss those days!

Now my parents live with us in the Tiny Cottage and soon we will have our own little grandson to make precious memories with! If you missed my announcement that I’m going to be a grandma, you can see that post here.

They say that time is a thief but when we savor each season I think it is a gift.

More “Drive By” posts on The Inspired Room:

Autumn Drive By – Charming Seattle Neighborhoods

Charming Beach Homes in Seabrook, Washington

Drive By: Madison Park in Seattle

Browse all my past “Drive By” posts here.

Looking for exterior and curb appeal ideas? Browse our inspiration gallery here!

The purpose of a sealant, or caulk, on the exterior of a home is to seal gaps that allow air and moisture to infiltrate the structure of the home.

That seems simple enough, but the reality of building materials is that they are constantly moving.

Changes in temperature and humidity cause them to continually expand and contract which means the size of those gaps is constantly changing.

This means that the caulk filling those gaps is regularly being stretched and squeezed, so if it dries hard it will crack within a season or two due to the movement. To have any longevity in an exterior environment, a sealant needs to remain flexible even after it dries.

Because most homes are comprised of many different types of materials, the gaps that need to be filled are often between completely different building materials. So, a successful exterior caulk also needs to bond, or adhere, well to a wide variety of materials and surface textures.

Because an exterior sealant is very visible, it’s also important for it to blend aesthetically with your home. Some caulk options are very flexible but cannot be painted and only come in a few colors. While there are plenty of “paintable” caulk options, many of them dry relatively hard within a few months. 

Solution: Elastomeric Caulk

Elastomeric caulk is a great solution because it has the ability to stretch.

Titebond has addressed all those issues with their new all-purpose exterior sealant called TiteShield.

It’s an elastomeric caulk which, as the name implies, can stretch even after it’s completely dry. In fact, TiteShield can expand and contract up to 50% of the joint size while covering gaps up to two inches in width.

TiteShield also bonds well to a variety of building materials from wood and metal to concrete and glass.

Plus, it’s available in a wide variety of colors but can also be painted with ordinary latex paint.

Further Reading

I had high hopes that I’d be finished with this cabinet by today, but I didn’t make it. I had completely forgotten that the walls and the ceiling in that area of the room hadn’t even been painted yet, so having to take care of that before working on the cabinet set me back a day on cabinet progress. But I did make a lot of progress, and this cabinet will be finished by Monday.

So for those of you who are just now seeing this project for the very first time, let me do a little bit of review. I’m working on a huge cabinet that sits right inside my studio door from the breakfast room, and I’m using IKEA Sektion cabinets with Veddinge doors to create this cabinet. I had originally planned for these cabinets to look fully built-in and match the other built-in cabinets in the room, which are pink with gold leaf accents.

But the more I thought about it, the more concerned I got about having three large sections of matching pink and gold cabinets. As much as I love pink and gold, I thought that all three large sections of cabinets matching might be overkill. So instead, I decided to design this section to look like a separate, standalone piece of furniture, like when you go to the furniture store and buy a china cabinet. So that’s my goal with this project, and if you’ve missed the previous posts about this cabinet, you might want to go back and review those first.

Please note: This is a multi-post project. If you missed the first two posts about this project, click on the titles below to read them.

The challenge with using IKEA Sektion cabinets is that the doors are all full overlay doors. So if you’re wanting to build a standalone cabinet using Sektion cabinets, and you want that cabinet to have a frame around it, like most standalone cabinets do, you have to build that part out yourself. Otherwise, all you’re going to see from the front is doors from edge to edge. Just doors. That’s it.

If you’re not quite sure what I’m talking about, let me use the cabinet that I built for our bathroom water closet as an example. When you look at the front of this cabinet, do you see how you’re not just seeing doors going all the way to the edges? You’re seeing framing all the way around (including additional decorative trim on the top and the bottom), so that the doors are inset into that framing.

Well, I wanted that for this studio cabinet, too. I didn’t just want the front view to be nothing but doors from the left side to the right side. I wanted the doors to be framed in a similar way to that bathroom cabinet. So in order to have that, I had to build out the frame myself.

I started by stacking and attaching four of the six cabinet boxes, making sure they were secured to each other. I attached very simple box feet to the bottom cabinets to raise them up three inches off the floor. You can read more about that process here. Those feet lifted the cabinets off the floor enough to provide space for the bottom trim.

Once the cabinets were screwed to each other, I added an 8-foot-long 2″ x 2″ piece of lumber to the side, making sure that the front of this piece was flush with the front edge of the cabinet box. I still needed to put the third row of cabinets on top, but for some reason that made sense to my brain at the time 😀 , I decided to attach these pieces to the side first.

I just screwed these into place using about three screws per cabinet, screwed from inside the cabinet and into the wood piece. I always pre-drill holes with IKEA cabinets to avoid cracking or chipping the white laminate.

Then I added another piece to the back edge of the cabinets, and screwed them into place the same way.

Once I had those two pieces on, I went ahead and added the two top cabinets, and screwed them to each other and to the side wood pieces as well.

And here’s what it looked like with all of the cabinets secured to each other, and the four 2″ x 2″ pieces of lumber attached to the sides.

Next, I added a piece of 3/4″ sanded plywood to the side, making sure that the edge of the plywood was flush with the 2″ x 2″ lumber and the front edge of the cabinet box. I nailed that to the 2″ x 2″ pieces using 1.5-inch 16-gauge nails.

Then I repeated that on the other side. (Please note that I didn’t build this cabinet where it’s actually going to sit. I had to move it away from the side wall to have room to work, but when it’s finished, it’ll be centered in that space.)

I forgot to take a photo of this next step before I moved on, but I cut more 2″ x 2″ pieces and nailed those to the top (front and both sides) to give me something to nail the crown molding onto later in the process.

Once the sides were covered, and the top pieces were in place, I began to frame out the front. For these pieces, I had to use my table saw to rip all of them to the right width, and then I also ran all of them through my planer so that they would be 5/8″ thick (the same thickness as the IKEA Veddinge doors) instead of 3/4″ thick.

I started by adding the vertical pieces on the left and right. The key with these front frame pieces is that they cannot overlap the IKEA cabinet boxes at all. If these pieces overlap the front edges of the cabinet boxes at all, they will interfere with the operation of the cabinet doors.

Next, I added the front frame piece along the top, again making sure that I came right up to the IKEA cabinet without covering it even the slightest bit.

And finally, I added the front frame piece along the bottom.

Now as much as I love IKEA cabinets, and have been singing their praises lately, there’s one thing that irritates me about them. My irritation is that the horizontal cabinet pieces don’t sit flush on the front edge or the bottom edge with the vertical pieces. For some reason, they’re inset both ways just a tiny bit.

That becomes an issue when you try to frame them or add trim because you’re going to end up with these gaps that have to be filled with caulk. It’s not a huge issue, but it’s just a slight irritation for me.

With the cabinet framed, I was ready to add the decorative trim. I started with the bottom, and added this trim on the front and sides.

Then I got curious and wanted to attach two doors to make sure everything looked right, and make sure that the doors would freely open and close without rubbing the frame pieces.

And when I was satisfied that it as all going to work out, I added the crown molding at the top.

So that’s as far as I got. The cabinet is built and trimmed, but I have all of the finishing work to do — wood filling, sanding, caulking, priming, and painting. But I feel pretty confident that I can get this finished this weekend.

Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.