A Day Late and a Dollar Short

Today Sarah is hosting her monthly Before and After bloggy party and I’ve decided to link up!

{Ok, so technically the party was yesterday but, whatever. Better late than never, right?}

Do you remember a loooong time ago…like four months or so…I told you how I was working on a DIY project that involved a can of Rustoleum?

And I was all mysterious about what it was but promised I’d show you later?

And then I never did?

Remember that???

I didn’t think so.

Well I decided today would be the perfect time to reveal what we did.

First, a little history.

Our home was built in the nineties and evidently, gold/brassy type light fixtures were all the rage because we have them ALL OVER our house – both inside AND out.

Pretty much all of our light fixtures look like this:

{source}

And, my personal favorite *cough* the chandelier in our dining room looks like this:

Some people might like it, and that’s fine, but it’s just really not my style.

And then we had the light fixtures OUTSIDE. They looked something like this:

{source}

I would have loved to be able to trade those bad boys in for something more like this:

{source}

…but at $160.00…PER LIGHT? You’ve got to be kidding me! Not. happening.

{Suddenly all the brass is making a lot more sense…}

Still, even though my husband told me that nobody pays attention to what color your garage door lights are, I wanted to see if there was something I could do to change it.

Enter Rustoleum. Spray paint for metal – genius!

One can of Rustoleum Dark Bronze Hammered Finish

…was all we needed to turn this:

Into this:

We just took apart the lights, spray painted them, then reassembled.

It took us a few hours {including paint drying time} on a Saturday. And I only electrocuted myself once before remembering that we needed to turn off the fuse while we reattached the wires :)

The best part? I think it was something like $5.00 for that can of spray paint {and we didn’t even use it all!}

While we were finishing up, our neighbor came out and said, “Hey! I like your new light fixtures!”

And I should have just smiled and said, “Thanks!”

But instead I said, “They’re not new! We spray painted our old ones! FIVE BUCKS!!!!!”

I’m classy like that ;)