That Old Brass Magic...
Today's post will be brief but I think you'll find it helpful if you find yourself trying to update a home with lots of brass hardware.
If you look back 10-15 years ago, brass was it. People loved seeing shiny brass on their doors, hanging from their ceilings and used as pulls on drawers and cabinets. Fast forward to 2008 and the look of brass is just plain, well, dated. There's just no getting around it.
If you're in a situation where you can afford to replace all those door knobs, light fixtures and switch plates when you're staging your home for sale, that's great. But many people I work with simply don't have the budget to replace them, at least not all of them. So what do you do? In some cases, paint is the best answer but in others, I like to use one of my favorite tricks in staging a home: forcing a tarnish on brass.
Taking a shiny brass switch plate or door knob and tarnishing it so it looks black is actually pretty easy. The solution? Easy-off oven cleaner. And not the low-odor kind. The old-fashioned kind that emits noxious fumes. This stuff will actually tarnish brass finishes right before your eyes -- it's pretty neat.
A couple of things to keep in mind: first, make sure you're actually dealing with brass or at least some metallic substance. A lot of bathrooms have fixtures (towel rods, tissue holders) that look like brass but are actually plastic, which won't react the way we want.
Second, you need to know that many brass items have a coat of plastic over them, so you may need to apply one coat of Easy-off, let it eat through the plastic, wipe off the item and reapply the Easy-off. This should then blacken the item as desired.
When it comes to light fixtures or cabinets knobs, my suggestion is to paint them. I like to use the Krylon Fusion line of paints on items like these because it sticks to just about anything you put in its path -- plastic, wood, metal -- whatever.
To give the fixtures or knobs the look of wrought iron, you'll first want to spray paint the item with some flat black Krylon Fusion and then go over it with a second coat of spray paint that has a wrought iron texture to it. (You'll find this at most hardware stores.) The Fusion acts as a primer, so the next coat of textured paint should stick well.
Finally, if you're doing door knobs, you'll probably want to either coat them a third time with textured paint or try a coat of spray-on polyurethane to help protect them when the cabinet doors are banged around a bit.
Good luck and happy staging!
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