I stripped and repainted the register in our bedroom. And I loved the process so much, I did it twice. Well, that’s not true. The part about loving it, I mean. The part about stripping and repainting it twice is totally true, unfortunately.
This original cast iron register had been painted sloppily a thousand times. It had drips and spatters in some areas and in others the paint was flaking off. You can sort of see it in the photos above, but believe me it looked even cruddier in person.
It needed to be completely stripped and repainted. I did the same thing for our bathroom register when we renovated the entire room and I liked the way it turned out.
I stripped with a chemical stripper it and primed it with a rust-blocking primer and then I performed a multi-step process to spray paint the inside one color and the outer frame another… And when all that was done, I was unhappy. And I stopped taking pictures.
There were a few areas where small globs of stripped paint didn’t get removed. (They weren’t obvious on the dark metal color.) And when I scraped the paint with my fingernail, it all came scratching off! I’m guessing the paint didn’t bond with the primer. Bleh.
So in an annoying turn of events, I decided I would have to do it all over again. I tried to do a more thorough job of stripping it the second time, scrubbing with a wire brush and cleaning it up with mineral spirits several times.
Then I primed again with the rusty metal spray primer, and let that cure for a full 48 hours. I wanted to make sure the primer and the paint bonded this time.
After all that, I’d had enough of the spray painting and thought I might get better results using some latex enamel. I brushed it on in thin coats, painting the outer “frame” white and the inner grate black.
You’re right. It’s not a dramatic change from what it was before, which feels kind of underwhelming after that whole convoluted process. But at least it doesn’t look grungy anymore!
