How To Refinish Rusted Fireplace Doors

How to quickly refinish old, rusted fireplace doors and a metal curtain with detailed instructions.  DIY HOME DECOR

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Around here we like to refinish if we can and buy new only if we have to.  This mentality has saved us a lot of money and waste.  We have also learned a lot along the way!  

Can you paint fireplace doors?
YES! There are just a few important steps you need to know that I will talk about in this post.

As you can see below, the fireplace insert we had was old and had seen better days.  The mesh curtain was completely rusted and so were the brass accents.  We were tempted to buy a new set of replacement doors for a couple of hundred dollars, but we decided to try and refinish the old, rusted one that we already had.  Just to see how it would turn out.  What was the harm?  I’m so glad we did!  This ended up being a very easy, quick, and cheap project and we love how it turned out!  It looks like we bought a set of new doors!

Before

After

The Rusty old brass

The rusty old mesh curtain

How to Paint Fireplace doors

Materials

• High temp spray paint – we used
• Painters tape
• Sandpaper
• New Curtain –  Here’s a link to the one we bought on Amazon
• Tarp, drop cloth, or an old sheet you don’t mind getting paint on

Instructions

• Start by wiping off and thoroughly cleaning the entire fireplace insert.  
• Then sand down any rusty or rough spots. This step of the process is very important otherwise, the paint will never stick. 
• Wipe it all again with a soft cloth or a microfiber cloth.
• Tape off any areas you don’t want to paint, like the fireplace glass doors.  We also removed the handles on ours because we liked the visual appeal of their brass color.

• Lay out your drop cloth outside and lay the fireplace doors on top.
• Spray with a light layer of the high-temperature spray paint.  Remember you can always layer more on top but you can’t take any away!

• Let that layer dry for about 20 minutes and repeat until you have the coverage you’re looking for.
• Let the doors dry for about 2-3 hours before peeling the tape away and putting the insert back inside.

We bought a new chain curtain because our old one was just too rusty to repair.  Here’s a link to the one we bought on Amazon.

We simply just replaced the old one, it just slid onto a rod that was attached to the back of the doors, which only took a few minutes.

There! Perfect fireplace doors that are as good as new!