Rusty Handrails

We’ve painted or refinished just about everything we can in this house so far, and we’re not stopping anytime soon. OK, that’s an exaggeration. We’ve painted a lot of stuff in our house, and we’ve got some more stuff we’d like to paint or refinish.

This weekend we tackled a project we’ve been putting off forever. We gave ourselves a deadline on this one so that we would finish before the end of September. It turned out to be a simple project that we got done in a day.

Those were our handrails on the steps leading to our front door. Nice and rusty, right? And why were they painted white?

 

I’m not sure if you can tell in the picture, but there’s a coat of black paint under the white. These are nice solid iron handrails that deserve better than a chipped and rusted finish.

I used a 3M Drill Mounted Rust and Paint Stripper to remove all of the crumbling finish, and it worked really well. It was pretty loud, but I didn’t hear anyone complaining.

After about an hour or two of stripping the finish off, and that’s what I was left with.

For our new look, we chose a matte black spray paint and primer in one from Rustoleum. This is the same stuff we used on our shutters. Everything matches! Woo hoo!

This was a pretty simple DIY, and I don’t know why we waited so long. Neither of us are too sure about the matte finish, but we’ll see how it holds up in the coming winter months.  Overall I think refinishing the handrails brings the whole look of the front of the house together pretty pleasingly.