We Painted Our 100-Year-Old Roof With Brooms — And It Transformed the House

The roof we started with

The roof was original to the old house and was more than a century old.

It looked every bit its age.

There was extensive surface rust and even some holes that needed patching, but we weren't trying to make a 100-year-old roof new again. We wanted to see whether we could extend its life and make it look significantly better without replacing the whole thing.

Up close, you could really see what we were dealing with.

We repaired what we could

Before painting, the holes in the old roof were patched.

This wasn't a roof restoration in the sense of trying to make everything perfect. The house itself was more than 100 years old and part of our approach throughout the renovation was working with what was already there where we reasonably could.

Once the repairs were dealt with, it was time for paint.

And yes, we used brooms

This is probably my favourite part of the story.

My dad and my husband painted the roof, and rather than using any elaborate equipment, they used ordinary brooms.

It sounds a bit unconventional, but the broom bristles were actually perfect for the old corrugated iron. They worked into the curves and grooves of the roof really well and made it easy to spread the paint across the uneven surface.

We used Dulux roof paint poured into a normal roller paint tray, dipped the brooms into the tray and worked our way across the roof.

There was nothing sophisticated about it — a couple of brooms, a standard paint tray and roof paint — but it worked remarkably well.

The contrast during painting was enormous. Seeing the rusty iron beside the freshly painted section made us realise just how much the old roof had been ageing the appearance of the entire house.

One day made an enormous difference

The project essentially cost us a day of labour, a couple of brooms and a tin of roof paint.

For such a relatively simple part of the renovation, the visual difference was huge.

We didn't suddenly have a new roof. We still had the same very old roof that had been sitting on the house for more than a century.

It just looked dramatically better.

And once the rest of the exterior renovation came together, the darker roof became part of the overall transformation rather than something that immediately made the house look tired.

Would we do it again?

For that particular house and that particular roof, yes.

One of the biggest lessons from renovating an old house was that replacement wasn't always the answer.

Sometimes the existing materials had plenty of life left in them. A repair, some paint and a willingness to work with what we had could make an enormous difference.

The roof was a perfect example.

It wasn't an expensive or sophisticated project. In fact, two people, a couple of brooms and a tin of paint is about as uncomplicated as renovation stories get.

But visually, it helped transform the entire house.