DIY Rusted Hardware

I have been work­ing on our island con­ver­sion for a few weeks now and I am final­ly gett­ting to the final touch­es on every­thing I want­ed the piece to look authen­ti­cal­ly old, that was my main goal. I bought new apothe­cary hard­ware from Ama­zon and absolute­ly LOVED the design. What I did­n’t love was how new they looked. They did­n’t match the age of the rest of the piece and I kin­da thought I was doomed. That was until I ran across this prod­uct shared by The Vin­tage Porch. It’s a Rust fin­ish met­al effects kit by Mod­ern Mas­ters. It was a very sim­ple and effec­tive 3‑step process that com­plete­ly changed the game.

These are the two prod­ucts I start­ed with

• Vin­tage Bronze Pulls
• Mod­ern Mas­terns Met­al Effects Kit

Per the direc­tions on the box, start by paint­ing your hard­ware with 2 coats of PRIMER, allow­ing 30 min­utes dry-time between each coat. It gave my hard­ware a nice rusty col­or with­out the actu­al rust, if that makes sense. Either way, it made me super excited! 

Once dry, apply 2 coats of the iron oxi­diz­ing paint with 30 min­utes of dry time in between coats. I could have set timers and been super tech­ni­cal about the whole process but I would apply a coat, walk away to work on some­thing else and come back lat­er. It was basi­cal­ly a real­ly thin watery black col­or. I was kinds iffy about it but the end result real­ly turned out beautifully! 

The third and final stage of the process was to spray the dry hard­ware with the rust acti­va­tor. Y’all, this is where the mag­ic hap­pens! As the acti­va­tor dries, real-life rust will actu­al­ly appear! My mind was blown, maybe you’ve heard of this stuff before but I sure had­n’t. This could be a total game chang­er, espe­cial­ly when you’re going for a nice vin­tage or aged feel.

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