DIY Galvanized Paint Method On Vintage Lockers

Because I’ll take anything, I was given two sets of shop lockers to do something creative with.  The company my husband works for was getting rid of them.  They were a bit rough and very dirty. However, I cleaned them up and left one set at home and we brought the other set up to our cabin.

Obviously the set that I had at home got my attention first because I saw them every day.  I transformed them into a cleaner shabby chic look with some vintage accessories which you can see at my first diy locker makeover.

It took me awhile to get started on the set, that we had at the cabin, because I wanted to have a rustic theme and was having a hard time coming up with a paint that I wanted to use.

Well, the other day, I saw on Pinterest a metal magazine rack that was painted to look like it had been galvanized.  I loved the look and immediately thought of my lockers.  I was glad I had waited to paint them until I came up with something that really hit me.  This was going to be perfect! They would still be very industrial in style and the DIY galvanized paint method would hide all of the imperfections very nicely.

DIY Galvanized Paint

Here is the before picture.

I should have taken a picture of the before, before…..when there was grease and grime covering the whole thing.  But, you can see they are fairly distressed…just not in a nice way.

The tutorial that I saw for getting the galvanized look said to first paint the surface with a flat black paint.  I skipped this step because I liked the base color that I was starting out with.  I figured that the lighter gray showing through would be just as good.  Either way works.

The next step is to use round sponge daubers and gunmetal gray paint.  This was a little time consuming but therapeutic too.  I enjoyed doing it because I was loving the results.

Here is a little close up:

Here are the lockers finished:

and side by side:

As you can see, I also added some fun rustic name plates.  Since my husband and son hunt several different animals, I thought I would use animal names that they hunt and came up with buck, duck, goose.  I thought it was quite funny as did my husband.  My son…..not so much.  It confirmed for him how uncool we really are!