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DIY

How to bust some rust in minutes

July 2, 2018

3-IN-ONE fast-acting penetrant

A quick note: This post is sponsored by 3-IN-ONE® Fast-Acting Penetrant, but you know I will always tell it like it is, so all words and opinions are entirely my own. Thanks for supporting the brands that support this blog.

This time of year is full of big projects. Whipping the garden into shape, never-ending weeding and, if you’re like me, just making more gardens. In the midst of all this busy-ness little things get pushed aside.

In this hideous before shot of our renovation (literally taken as we were moving out) you can see the cellar doors on the right. There’s no hiding those!

One of those little things is an annoying development with our cellar doors that lead to the basement from our patio. I have a love-hate relationship with these doors. I love that we have access to the basement from outside and I can’t tell you how much it comes in handy. But I hate that the doors are smack dab in the front of our house. There’s not a thing to be done about that, so we just paint them an innocuous color and avert our eyes.

Rusty cellar door handles

Hard to open up the big cellar doors when the handles were rusted in this position.

The doors are big, heavy things that require a bit of heft to move. So when the handles seized up over winter, it made it even more difficult to open them. And this time of year we go in and out of them a lot, sometimes to just dump our muddy clothes by the washing machine before we go upstairs. Because the handles are stuck and therefore the doors are difficult to open, we end up leaving them open a lot. And that makes the whole situation on the patio even more ugly.

The other day I got completely sick of the situation. Most of the plants are now in the ground and the patio is starting to get cleaned up. We’d like to sit out there and enjoy summer a little. So when I reached to open the doors and had to jam my hand under the stuck handle for the millionth time this spring, I decided that all other projects had to wait until I fixed this.

I grabbed 3-IN-ONE®  Fast-Acting Penetrant, which is designed to quickly loosen stuck parts and prevent rust, and put two or three drops down the tube where the handle fits in. Then I waited about a minute (OK, I was checking Instagram), and worked the handles back and forth a bit. 

how to unstick a rusty handle

Two drops of 3-IN-ONE Fast-Acting Penetrant and a check of Instagram (to pass the time while waiting for it to do it’s thing) got this seized-up handle working again.

And guess what? They were released, moving smoothly in any position, meaning I could once again open the doors with my hand in the proper position and not throw out a critical body part trying to open those doors.

Loosening rusted handles

After the penetrant had a couple minutes to work I just worked the handles back and forth and it was like magic: unstuck!

Seriously that was it. I spent four months cursing something I fixed in two minutes and one Instagram check with three drops of 3-IN-ONE® Fast-Acting Penetrant. What in the world took me so long to check this off the list?

For more handy tips, follow 3-IN-ONE® on Facebook and Instagram. Click here to find what store near you carries 3-IN-ONE® Fast-Acting Penetrant. 

Pin it for later:

Got a rusted handle, hinge, window lock or whatsit? Here's how to fix it fast. #diy #fixityourself

cellar DIY
by Erin @ The Impatient Gardener 
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About Erin @ The Impatient Gardener

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Comments

  1. Billie Wallace says: July 2, 2018 at 11:07 am

    I have never heard of this product. Thanks for sharing.

    Reply

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The Impatient Gardener

Do you love gardening? Me too! I'm Erin and I garden in Southeastern Wisconsin, zone 5. The Impatient Gardener is all about real-life gardening: the good parts, the bad bits and even the funny stuff. It's part information, part inspiration and a little bit commiseration. Thanks for visiting.

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Erin Schanen 🌿 The Impatient Gardener
These sister dahlias are big, beautiful girls. Pen These sister dahlias are big, beautiful girls. Penhill Watermelon (first picture) and Penhill Dark Monarch are the best two HUGE dahlias that I grow. They share slightly twisty petals (Watermelon more so) and, when you look closely, subtle striations that add a beautiful depth of color. Watermelon grows taller than Dark Monarch (7 feet tall or more sometimes) and they both need serious staking, but it’s worth it because they produce a lot of flowers for a large-flowering dahlia. 

I like them both but if I was forced to choose (and who would make me do that?) I’d give the edge to Dark Monarch because it’s a little easier to manage size-wise, produces more flowers and has a bigger variation in flower color so it’s always interesting. 

Which do you like better?
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