Painting outdoor lights (the easiest way yet!)

Most of the houses on our street started out with the same gross exterior lights: dull white lantern-style sconces with a flat finish — like maybe they had been primed, for some weird reason.

The dull white lights don’t do justice to anyone’s home, regardless of the colour of their siding, so I originally decided to paint mine four years ago.

Longtime readers may recall when I taped off the glass sections, taped garbage bags over the surrounding siding and used a can of black spray paint on our yucky white porch lights (as well as the lights over our back deck).

The spray paint worked pretty well, except that the wind kept blowing my garbage bags around and I ended up getting black overspray on our beige siding. Oops. I was able to scrub off some of it, but there are still black-specled areas there — almost four years later.

The paint on the lights did hold up nicely, and it’s only been in the last year that I’ve noticed the old white finish finally showing through in some areas. Ick.

I was bracing myself to spray-paint the lights again, but then something occurred to me while I was painting our front door.

What if I used a brush dipped in regular paint, instead of using spray-paint? Hmmm.

Continue reading in my weekly DIY column, My Handmade Home …