Brass Be Gone

I have previously mentioned that Ryan and I inherited some gorgeous oak dressers from his mom.  There is one big tall one and a long shorter one.  The only problem I had with them was the brass handles were UGLY.  They were well wore and completely 1970s!  Now I had originally wanted to just get new handles... but the problem was that these handles were BIG and when we took them off the dresser we found the wood underneath them was bright while the rest of the dresser was weathered.  Now eventually I would love to refinish/re stain the dressers but for now I wanted to leave them as is.  So that's when I decided it would be fun to spray paint the handles just like we did with the hardware in the kitchen in the old house (see here) This is the tall dresser with the handles before.

First step was to remove all 20 handles from the 2 dressers and clean them all.  We used soap and water and scrubbed them all to get the many years of oily fingerprints off of them.

Last time we spray painted handles we used Styrofoam to put them in so it would be easy to spray paint them.  This time we decided to use a different method for two reasons. First we didn't have any spare Styrofoam lying around (very good reason). And if that reason isn't enough for you, the second reason was that since the handle flips it would take 5 times as long to do the handles because you would have to keep flipping the handle up and down and wait for it to dry each time.

At first I had planned on hanging them all from a rope and spray painting them as they hung. Then Ryan grabbed a scrap of plywood and hammered a bunch of nails into both sides of the piece and we simply hung the handles from the screw hole in the back on the nails.

Voila!!  Hanging handles!

This is a good close up of what they looked like before.



Next it was time to prime them. I opted for a grey primer as I knew I was going to spray paint them black.



We did two coats of primer letting each coat dry for an hour (follow the directions on the spray can... each brand is different).  Then using a rough textured black spray paint we coated them in two coats of black. And with that we have these lovely black handles... they look SOOOO much better!!!

I can't wait to get home from the cottage to install them all and see what they look like!!!  I still have to show the bedside tables my dad made with the handles I picked up for 62 cents each that tie in perfectly to our new handles!!! But you'll have to wait for that! For now Norah and I are having a blast digging in the dirt!