Spray Painting Vent Covers To Match Floor Color

Is it just us or wouldn’t it be better if vent covers didn’t stand out as much as they usually do? In our area, chances are they are beige, even though your flooring is a dark walnut (our case). They may be white, even though your carpet is beige. Or they may be dark brown even though your flooring is a really nice travertine tile.

Does anyone really think they look nice like that?

We don’t. In a perfect world, they’d be completely invisible. However, since that may be next to impossible, we believe that spray painting them is one of the best alternatives you can try to hide, blend or disguise them as much as possible.

On this post, we show you how to do it.

 

 

 

SPRAY PAINTING VENT COVERS TO MATCH FLOOR COLOR

Spray painting your vent covers is definitely a very easy project you can complete in a couple of hours (not counting paint drying times). And best of all, you do not need a lot of tools or materials to do it. The complete list includes:

• Screwdrivers, hand tools and personal protective equipment (always useful)
• Garden hose
• Rags, brush and cleaning products (optional)
• Your favorite Spray Paint (we got dark brown to match our hardwood floors)
• Plastic Sheeting

STEP 1: REMOVE AND CLEAN UP THE VENT COVERS

As you may imagine, the first thing we did was removing and cleaning up the vent covers. Usually, you just have to pull them out to remove them. However, if for any reason they get stuck, you can use a small screwdriver to pry them out.

To clean them up, we just sprayed them with water. Depending on how old and dirty yours are, though, you may need to use a brush, rag or even some kind of solvent to make sure they’re clean.

 

Lastly, we let them dry under the sun for a few minutes before moving on to the next step.

STEP 2: ORGANIZE THE VENT COVERS FOR PAINT

Spraying paint is usually a messy job. To minimize the mess and because of the strong odor, we definitely recommend doing this job outside the house. We also recommend covering anything you do not want to get paint on, even if you think it is far enough not to get painted. I would say that anything that is not at least 20 feet away should be covered.

So, before we got all the vent covers organized for paint, we covered our backyard patio with some plastic sheeting. We used some rocks, and later, some pieces of wood and rocks to keep it from blowing away. Then we organized the vent covers on top of the plastic sheeting.

 

STEP 3: SPRAY PAINT THE VENT COVERS

With the vent covers organized upside down, we went ahead and started painting them with the spray paint. We did it this way because our plan was to just let them dry for about fifteen minutes before painting the front of the vents. If we did the opposite, we risked getting the vent covers stuck to the plastic sheeting and damaging the paint job.

 

So, after putting a coat of paint on the back of the vent covers and waiting for about fifteen minutes, we went ahead and turned them over to paint the fronts.

 

 

 

Once we were done, we let them dry for a few hours. Then we moved them to the garage and continued letting them dry overnight.

As it usually happens when you paint, though, it isn’t until after the paint has completely dried that you can see all the imperfections, spots you missed, etc. So the next day, we repeated the process, for a total of two coats of paint on each side of the vent covers. Then, once again, we let them dry overnight.

STEP 4: RE-INSTALL THE VENT COVERS

Once we were happy with the results of our paint job, we went ahead and re-installed the vent covers. This is as easy as removing them, just put them back and they should fall in place. Push them down a bit if needed.

 

 

Readers, are you happy with the way your vent covers look? Any plans to spray paint them as well?

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