Little Brick Cottage: Radiators Before & After

 **Please Note** The little brick cottage renovation project took place and was originally posted here in 2012! It was my first project I posted on as well. Scroll to the bottom of this post to see posts on this entire project.

In the little brick cottage, we have a boiler with old cast iron radiators for the heat source.

When we bought the cottage, though the radiators worked great, they were painted the same color as the walls. That seems like it would be a good idea, but somehow, maybe partly because they were chipped, dusty and dirty, it just didn’t look good.

Also, partly because the wall color was not great. The two bedroom radiators matching the wall color, meant one was a bright orange and one was a pale lavender. The rest of the radiators in the main rooms of the house were painted dark brown. All the radiators had chipped up paint and overall dirtiness, so I knew I’d be painting them.

In the bedrooms, I painted the radiators white to match the trim. This set them off from the wall color a bit.

Before and after pics of the back bedroom radiator.

To cover the orange you see on the left took 3 coats of white paint and a lot of patience getting as far in the ‘fins’ of the radiator as I could.

I did the same white finish in the other bedroom, but when it came to big radiators in the living room, dining room and kitchen, I wondered if they might actually look better in a metallic finish.

In the other rooms, I did a different treatment to the radiators, and I love how it turned out!

Here’s what I grabbed out of my paint room.

I had bought this Ralph Lauren Metallic finish latex paint from Home Depot a couple years ago for my wood countertop in my master bathroom. It worked so well there, I thought it maybe would cover the brown finish on the radiators and be durable too. (This Ralph Lauren paint is no longer available, but I found THIS ONE that is very similar!)

Well, I figured, here goes nothing. What am I out? If it doesn’t go on well, I can always paint them white like the bedrooms. But if I can save myself painting 2 extra coats, that’d be great!

Hmmmm, seems to go on really smoothly.

And basically cover the brown in one easy coat.

Here’s that same radiator before:

and after:

I’m super pleased with the end result. Not only was the coverage fantastic in a single coat, the dark bronze metallic finish is beautiful and now these radiators that were once an ‘eye-sore’ are now like ‘sculpture’ in a gorgeous antiqued bronze finish, that was super simple to do…and, I have lots of that yummy paint leftover for my next project that needs metallic bronze finish.

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Here are all the posts from 2012 showing the entire renovations projects on the little brick cottage: