Repainting Wood Blinds
Why buy new window dressing when you can revive an old set by repainting wood blinds? Maybe you already have them hanging around in your house, attic, or garage. Maybe you found a cute set of them at a used store or yard sale. In either case, repainting wood blinds takes just a few hours out of your day, and it can liven up any room with a fresh, innovative look. Here are a few handy tips to describe the entire process.
Prepare Your Environment
Prepare your environment before painting. Repainting blinds can get messy if you don't take care to spread out some plain white paper, remove the blinds from the window, and remove each slat and place each one of them on the paper. Plain white paper is preferred so that you can easily spot spills or discrepancies in the wood.
Remove Previous Efforts
Next, remove any existing paint with a chemical stripper and then clean the wood with warm soapy water. Blinds that are made of wood with wide pores make paint removal a little harder than expected.
If you're dealing with oak, ash, or walnut blinds, let the chemical stripper sit on the wood for about five minutes and then using a stiff brush, scrub it way before you start repainting wood blinds.
Check For Rough Spots, Dents, or Cracks
After cleaning and/or removing existing paint, let the wood dry and run your hand across it to check for rough spots, dents, or cracks. Should you find dents or cracks, fill them in with wood filler before you begin repainting wood blinds.
Wood filler is basically soft putty that hardens after a little while. Because you're going to cover the wood with colored paint, the specific color of the putty isn't really an issue - however you do want to choose a filler that is as close to the tint of the paint you'll use as possible. Dark colored putty will stand out under a lightly colored paint and light colored putty will be hard to cover with a dark colored paint.
You can gently sand away any rough spots as well.
Give Them A Good Start
The next step of repainting wood blinds is to remove the dust that you might have created from sanding and then apply an extremely thin base coat to each slat of wood. The reason why you want to apply an extremely thin coat when repainting wood blinds is because if the coat is too thick, the slats may not fit back into their original positions when you put the blinds back together.
When that coat has dried, apply another thin coat of wood paint to each slat of wood. While those slats are drying, you can repeat these steps on the blind frame.
To protect your paint job, you can follow up repainting wood blinds with a clear glossy or satin finish. Just like the paint, the clear finish must be applied in a thin coat as well so that everything easily can fit back together.
When everything is dry, you can reassemble the blinds and place them back into their windows.
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