Painting Wooden Blinds

* This post contains affiliate links. For more information, please read my affiliate disclosure. *

We recently updated our daughter’s bedroom by adding a loft-style bed, a futon, and just after Christmas, a brand new hanging chair.  Did you miss that post?  Here is the link to read about How Her Room Came Together.  So when we did the final clean and photoshoot, the blinds popped back on my radar.

The Blind Situation

This room has a nice bay window, with one large window in the middle and two smaller ones on the sides.  All the windows had blinds when we bought the house, but for some or other reason, this room had a completely different color than the rest of the blinds in the house.  These three were light brown/beige in color while all the other rooms had dark brown blinds.  Maybe not easy to notice, but I noticed it, especially when looking at it from the outside.  Since uniformity is a big deal for me (you can ask my family – they are painfully aware), I knew they had to change at some point.  I also wanted to shorten them, since they were actually floor to ceiling in length, and all the extra slats sat in a big pile on the window sill.  But then life happened and I forgot about the faux wooden blind “situation”.

Prepping for Paint

I decided on spray paint and found a good option at Home Depot.  I bought 5x cans of Rust-Oleum Painters Touch 2X which is a Paint and Primer in one.  Of course, I forgot to take a sample of the color I had to match, so I just picked the Satin Espresso.  It looked close to the color I needed.  If you don’t have a hardware store around the corner, just order it on Amazon – here is the link for the Espresso color I used on my blinds.

As part of the prep work, I shortened all the blinds to the correct window length before taking them down.  Shortening them was much easier than I expected, and of course, I had that “should have done this ages ago” moment.  You simply pop out the two “buttons” on the underside of the blind (usually a thicker slat than the rest) and cut the knots on the two main strings.  Put the bottom slat to the side – you are going to use this one again!  Pull the main strings out of the slats you want to remove and simply slide them out (to the left or to the right) of the rope ladder.  Slide your bottom slat back into place and thread your main strings down through the holes.  You then want to thread them through the “buttons” before tying a new knot to keep everything in place.  I used one of those small screwdrivers to help push the string through the button.  The “buttons” can now be pushed back into the bottom slat.  Voila!  A blind that is the proper length!  Who knew?

Since this past weekend was a cold one in Georgia, I opted for painting indoors.  Hubby was nice enough to not only hang the blinds from the ceiling but to also do most all of the painting.  Lucky me!  We hung the blinds from the ceiling using hooks and some wire we had laying around.  Oh, and we didn’t take the blinds apart to paint.  We decided to paint them as a unit.   Sure the strings get painted this way as well, but they were light-colored too and needed to change.  I did give them a quick dusting before we started to paint 🙂

Painting the Blinds

It was finally happening.  We were ready for paint.  It is important to give light coats and have them dry properly between coats.  Pieter ended up giving them about 4 coats per side.  We just repeated multiple light coats and waited for them to dry completely before applying the next coat.  We also left them hanging for an extra day after we did the final coat.  Don’t forget to also paint the brackets and wands (if you have those).  I removed all the brackets from the window frames and painted them separately.  Same for the wands used to open and close the blinds.

All that was left to do after that, was to take them back upstairs and rehang them.

I have to say, I’m very pleased with how it turned out.  Not only does it look very good from the inside, but I can also finally look at my house and not see that one room that looks different than the rest.

Have you tried to spray paint faux wood blinds and were you happy with the outcome?

PSSST: Do you have blinds and curtains, but the morning sun still creeps past the sides?  I have a fix for that!  Don’t miss my post on how to Fix the Curtain Side Gap!