The burglar bars are rusting from the bottom up: the half-day that stops the rot

Every window grill and door bar in the country is a painted steel sentence that the weather keeps editing: the film the builder sprayed at the factory holds for a few harmattans, then the bottom rail - where rain and wash-water pool against the frame - starts to bloom brown, and the rust goes into the metal while the paint above it still looks fine. A grill is a security device, so this is not a cosmetics page: it is a maintenance inspection with a paint pot at the end of it.

Read the damage before you buy the tin

• Surface bloom - brown dust on intact metal, paint chalky: cosmetic, the whole page below fixes it in a day per window.
• Blistered paint with a hard scale under it - the steel is already section-lost under the scale; the section you worry about is where bars meet the frame and where the frame meets the wall: scrape, inspect the real thickness with a fingernail on clean metal, and a bar that flakes through to pitting at a weld is the welder's visit, not the painter's.
• Swollen, cracked render or paint around the fixing points - the bar's anchors are rusting inside the wall and jacking the mortar apart, the same story the leak article tells about hidden steel; that is a fix-and-re-render conversation, and repainting over it is a year of camouflage.

The half-day per window, in order

Wire brush and 80-grit to bare, honest metal on every rusted run - the bottom rails twice, because they are the reason the last coat failed; a rag with thinners or detergent-and-water to strip the dust and the grease off before anything goes on; the flash-rust rule - primer within the hour, the sky counts as a damp day; zinc-rich primer (the grey cold-galvanising kind the market stocks for exactly this) on the bare metal, especially every horizontal surface and joint, and one good coat on everything else; then the enamel - exterior-grade, alkyd for the gloss-and-toughness trade the market trusts, two thin coats, second after the tin's time - and the desk's one unforgiving line: paint the ends and the undersides of the bottom rail, the surfaces the rain hits from behind, which is the face no one paints and the face the rust attacks first. And the weather: this job belongs to the harmattan, where the coats cure at their rated speed and the dust is managed by the same wipe-and-wait discipline the painting article preaches.

The safety audit that comes free with the brush

The grill is a security device and an escape route, and both die quietly with rust. Push each bar: a solid bar should not move at its fixing points, and a clicking or rotating one is pulling out of a softened hole - the anchor or the weld is the repair, today. Check the hinges and any quick-release on the emergency side: the bedroom bars that cannot open fast are the harmattan fire page's problem in a worse way, so the padlock-on-the-inside habit, the emergency key on the hook, and the oil on every moving steel joint belong on this afternoon's list. The desk's closing sentence is the only one that matters for the whole page: the grill rusts at its bottom, the paint protects at its first coat, and the inspection is a ten-minute favour to the metal that keeps the house's promises at the window.