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 kind of ugly.

The two bedroom ones were each painted the same color as the walls, so that would be one was a bright orange and one was a pale lavender. The rest of the rads in the main rooms of the house were painted a dark brown. All the radiators had chipped up paint and all-over dingy-ness, so I knew I’d be painting them.

In the bedroom, I painted them white:

Here are some before and after pics of the back bedroom radiator…

In the other rooms, I did a beautiful treatment to the radiators!

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.

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!)

See what I mean about over-all dingy-ness?

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. 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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