How We Painted Antique Door Hardware
I did you right and quickly followed up with part two of our story about restoring the antique hardware from my grandparents’ home.
I was able to strip all of the layers of paint from the hardware by soaking it in a crock-pot on low heat with a little bit of Dawn dish soap. Get all the details here.
After all the hardware was dry, and down to the raw metal, I had some decisions to make. I had no idea what the bare metal was, let alone know the condition it would be in. It turns out that most of it was copper.
Unfortunately, copper hardware was not what I had in mind for the overall design of the house. Just so I didn’t completely abandon the idea, I first tried to polish it to remove the tarnished spots. A lot of elbow grease later, and it wasn’t much better.
From there, I moved on to my original plan A—painting the hardware. All along, I was hoping for a brass to antique brass finish on this hardware. Many of the design elements throughout the home will share this feature.
Regardless, the hardware needed to be sealed in some way to prevent rust. I took to the Google machine and pulled up a few contenders for best antique brass paint. Here’s what I tested:
All three colors were beautiful. Champagne bronze had the most metallic-looking finish of the three and was closest to the color I hoped to achieve. It was also the most saturated—remember this fact in a minute.
The other two colors were just as beautiful but had much more shimmer or glitter properties to them and were much sheerer. As much as I love glitter and shimmer, they weren’t right for this application.
Champagne bronze it was. I wiped and brushed each piece to make sure I had a clean surface to work with, and I went to town with the spray paint. Spray paint is an easy way to get a flawless finish, and the Rust-Oleum formula was exactly what I needed to protect the hardware from rusting.
Once everything was painted on each side, I looked back in my box of hardware and pulled out one of the knobs. I didn’t soak any of these because they still had a brass finish that had never been painted over. When I say brass, it wasn’t a brass I loved.
I went back to my line-up of paints and picked antique brass. It was the darkest of the three, had some shimmer, and was sheer. This would allow for the original finish, the knicks, and the areas where the knob had worn over the years to peek through.
The color combo was perfect. To take it a step further, I lightly sanded (in one direction) across the knob to give it just enough distressing.
I can’t wait to see this hardware reunited with the doors. Here’s hoping matching everything up will be a breeze.
Oh, and what we have planned for the doors themselves is another story. That one, you’ll have to wait for.
