How To Restore An Old Metal Railing

It took almost exactly two years, but our back porch refurbish project is finally done! You can see how the porch looked when we first moved in below. The stairs were caked with built-up dirt and debris, the original custom iron railings were chipping and covered with rust, and the brick was in desperate need of a good power wash. To be honest, the porch continued on in that state for many, many months as we focused our attention on the renovation inside our new 1960s home, but we did eventually get our act together. Let me talk you through the slow phases that we went through to cross this project off our list.

Several months post-move, I got a wild hair to start sprucing up the porch, but I knew that I wanted to take it in chunks. Time and budget were both tight, so I figured we could easily make little improvements here and there until the job was done. John and I started by ripping out the overgrown shrubs surrounding the brick so we could show off the nice lines of the porch structure itself, and then we pressure-washed the brick to really make it shine. After that, I repainted the storm door a rich black color to help modernize it a bit.

As for the railings, we honestly didn’t know what to do about them. Should we try refinishing them ourselves? Hire it out to a pro refinisher? Scrap them entirely and build new wood railings? The possibilities overwhelmed our brains, so we decided to do the next best thing and just get them out of sight and out of mind for a little while.

John and I carefully removed the old railing hardware and stored it away in a labeled baggie, then lifted the old railings off the brick porch and stowed them in our backyard shed to be dealt with at a future date. I just really wanted a blank slate to look at, and actually loved how the porch looked without its railings! Of course, the Internet had a field day with the hypothetical dangers of a railing-less porch when I posted about it online, but it was never an issue for us. Still, we decided that the railings should eventually come back, so we started making a real plan this past spring.

Like I said, we considered refinishing them ourselves (i.e. scraping and sanding down the old flaking paint and rust), but time just never allowed for that. John and I both work multiple jobs, and if we have a day off together, the last thing we want to be doing is tedious grunt work on a pair of rusty old railings. So, we finally admitted to ourselves that it was time to hire it out, and that’s exactly what we did. We found a local media blaster who could remove all of the old finish, leaving us with nice clean railings ready to be painted.

It cost just $100 per rail for the service, which I thought was a great deal. The local team came to pick up the railings one weekday evening, and had them back within a couple of weeks. Since we weren’t ready to paint the exact day the railings were re-delivered, they went back into the shed for about a week. Unhappily, it was a pretty rainy week during that delay, so some of the rust reappeared, as you’ll see in the photos above, but it was a really thin layer, and John and I planned to use a paint made to cover and seal rust on metal anyway, so we weren’t too concerned. It looks worse than it actually was—trust me!

Come painting day, we carefully reattached the media-blasted railings to the porch and house using the old hardware I had saved, and then we got down to business with our paint. You’ll see the type we used pictured below. It’s from Rust-oleum, and is a hammered black finish that, like I said, is formulated to cover and protect against rust on metal. John used it on the basement railings on the other side of our house last year (before/after seen here), and it’s holding up great, so we decided to use it again in this instance.

We used painter’s tape to mask around the areas where the railings met the brick, and then John and I tag-teamed painting the railings with our rust-proof paint. It only ended up taking one really thick coat of paint, which was such a blessing since getting into all of those grooves was really tedious. It took about two hours to complete the job, and then we immediately removed the painter’s tape before the paint had a chance to dry (this limits the risk of peeling the new paint off with the tape). Stepping back, we were super impressed by the difference that the black paint made visually. The railings looked brand new, and definitely much more modern than they looked before in their old off-white paint finish.

I really love the specific paint we used. That hammered texture does a great job hiding dings and rust spots in the iron from decades of use, and adds this cool reflective texture that, again, modernizes the railings so much. I’m genuinely in love with the finished results, and am relieved that we didn’t opt to start over with a different type of railing. These custom railings are really nice and suit the 1960s style of the house after all. They are perfect, and, hopefully, will now last another 50-odd years! What do you think? Would you have restored the railings, too, or would you have gotten something new? If you have a similar project on your hands and are planning to refurbish your existing iron railings, let me know in the comments if you have any specific questions about what we did.

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