shiny and new

Remember the Christmas present I got for my parents? Ah, no you don't because I never wrote about it. Oops! Well, for Christmas I bought them a bunch of tile, some spacers, grout, and other fun stuff. Why, you ask? Because of the huge eyesore that remained after I painted their dining room. 

Yikes.

Their Christmas present was that I would replace that horrible tile with white subway porcelain tiles that look like marble. (They look like this, but they're not real marble). It was pretty obvious, though, that you couldn't replace the tile without addressing the area around it, too. So today was step one of delivering their Christmas gift: polishing the woodstove.

I'll admit, the woodstove has looked like that for so long I took it for granted that it would look that way. What else could it look like? I did some research online and found that it's actually pretty easy to get it looking back to new, effectivly erasing more than 20 years of rust and yuck.

I started by sweeping everything (including the brick) with a broom. Then Dave and I attacked the woodstove with some coarse steel wool, focusing on the rust spots. It immediately started to taint the air with a disgusting metallic taste, so if you're going to try this I'd recommend wearing one of those dorky mouth cover things.

We soldiered on while holding our breath, even though it looked like we were just pushing the rust around. We would periodically wipe our areas down with a damp rag to make sure we were actually doing something, and all told the sanding phase took about two hours. (There was a lot of rust and the stove has a lot of ridges).

After that, I wiped down the entire woodstove with mineral spirits to get it polish ready.

The polishing step was very straightforward - I put a small amount of polish on a rag, wiped it on, and kept it moving. It was pretty amazing how dramatic the effect was - I told you I forgot what it was supposed to look like!

The stove has a lot of detail in it, some of which I couldn't get with the rag. I used a Q-tip so some of the trickier spots, and even still there are still a few areas I didn't hit. Those areas look pretty obvious in the photos, but in real life you can't see them at all.

After the polish dried (45 minutes?) I wiped the entire thing down with a clean, damp rag to remove any excess polish that didn't soak in, and voila!

This project took near 3 hours and cost about $15. Not bad for such a dramatic before and after! Next, it's on to white washing the brick!