How to Restore Brass Hardware – House Flip
Last week we worked hard at #flipmagnolia restoring old brass hardware and painting some doors. We have decided to keep the current doors throughout #flipmagnolia. There is something charming about these old doors in old homes. And I guess, you can’t beat the price. So, in order to make these old doors work, we had to give them a full makeover. We chose black as the color paint for the doors. We plan on having white trim throughout the house and light-colored walls. So we thought the black doors would create a beautiful contrast with beautifully restored brass hardware.
With any old house, chances are that at some point someone was too lazy (I am guilty of this!) to remove the door hardware before painting it. And in our case, this was very true. All of the doors’ hardware looks like the photo below. As of now, we have restored three doors and still have a couple more doors to go. Here is just a little bit of our restoration process.
How to Restore Brass Hardware Step 1
1- I didn’t realize this step would be easy. You know, once you glance at hardware sadly covered in paint, you wonder how can someone possibly remove the many layers of paint and recover the original brass look. Well, to put it simply, all I used was boiling water. Because I don’t know if there is a risk of having lead in this paint, I didn’t use any of my pots and pans to place the hardware in it. Instead, I placed the hardware inside a bucket and dumped boiling water on the different pieces. I drained the hot water from the bucket once and repeat the step one more time. After that, with a scraper in hand, I was able to scrape and peel all the paint off the hardware.
How to Restore Brass Hardware Step 2
2- We weren’t happy with the patina and aged look of the hardware once the paint was removed as you can see in the photo above. So we decided to polish it and recover its original shine. I tried three products in this step. And the one that really worked was Bar Keepers Friend. This product works like magic. Basically, you get the hardware wet, then you sprinkle the product on, give a couple of seconds and then wipe the product off. If you want, head on to my stories (find the restoring hardware story) so you can see this take action. This was a very satisfying process.
We are super happy with how it turned out. It is definitely, not new brass hardware, but I guess we are going for the vintage look here.
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