How We Painted Our Vinyl Windows Black

In summer of 2023, we had our Mid Century Modern home painted from tan to black. I was concerned that the white vinyl windows wouldn’t look good, but replacing them wasn’t in our budget. When I asked the professional painters who painted our house about the possibility of painting the vinyl windows black, they strongly recommended against it, but we decided to go ahead and try it ourselves. It was a lot of work, but they turned out amazing and have held up great, so I wanted to blog about how we painted the exterior frames of our windows in case anyone else is thinking about trying it.

When we purchased the home, the exterior was a tan color, and the first time we saw the house, I thought it was very plain looking at best and even kind of ugly. Here’s a picture from the original listing:

We sometimes talked about painting the house a different color. I had always loved the look of black houses, and in 2023 we decided to go for it and have the house painted black. I was a little bit nervous about using BLACK black and briefly considered dark gray instead, but Josiah convinced me to go for it, and the color we went with was Sherwin Williams Black Magic. It has warm undertones, which I felt was important for it to look good next to the tan stone on the front of our house.

We were actually out of town when the front of the house was being painted, so our first look at the finished paint job was when we drove up after arriving home from our vacation and were greeted by this view:

We both looked at each other with a sinking feeling in our gut, because we hated it. Okay, maybe “hate” is too strong, but something about it didn’t look right and the immediate feeling was that we had made an expensive mistake.

After talking it over, we realized it wasn’t the paint color that we disliked, but how the black paint color made the white windows stand out and look cheap and tacky against the tan stone. We had already spent too much money on the paint job to go back, so the windows would have to change.

Can You Paint Window Frames Black?

We decided to try painting the vinyl window frames, figuring we had nothing to lose: if painting them didn’t work we would just replace them, but if it did work, we would save thousands of dollars. So, we purchased paint, a good paint sprayer, and a lot of plastic, rolled up our sleeves, and got to work.

But after we were finished, we were THRILLED with the results. That one change made us LOVE our black house, and over a year later the paint is holding up well and the windows still look great!

If you look closely, you can still see some drips in a few places from while Josiah was figuring out the right technique with the paint sprayer, but you really have to be looking for it to notice and 99% of people would never think about it.

Below I will share our exact process and materials for anyone else who wants to try painting vinyl windows. We pretty much followed the steps outlined in this blog post, which I recommend reading.

Type of Paint and Primer Used for Painting Vinyl Windows

The biggest key to getting good results with painting our windows was choosing the right paint and primer. After doing some research and consulting with the the professionals at a local paint store, we ended up using Sherwin Williams Extreme Bond primer, tinted gray, as the base layer.

The paint was tricky, we learned, because the type of tint typically used to color paint black can fade to purple in harsh sunlight. We used a type of Sherwin Williams exterior paint designed specifically for painting vinyl, tinted as dark as possible. I’m kicking myself because I’ve thrown away the paint can and can’t remember the exact name, but will update this post as soon as I find out what it was. The color wasn’t exactly the same as the black we used for our house, but there’s no noticeable difference.

Prep Work We Did Before Painting the Windows

The prep work was the most time-consuming part of the whole project. First, we removed all of the screens and thoroughly washed the windows and window frames. In order to get a good finish, we decided to spray the windows, which meant taping off the window frames and covering the glass and the area around the windows with plastic.

While we were in the middle of painting, I thought our house looked like it was wearing emo style mascara!

After spraying and removing the plastic, there was a lot of touch up work to be done. Not only were there places where the taping wasn’t perfect or had peeled away the paint upon removal, but I also discovered the paint would not stick to the white silicone that was used around the edges of the windows.

I ended up using black Rustoleum spray paint on the white silicone, and thankfully that worked better and didn’t stand out noticeably. I also painted the frames of all of the screens by hand, using a roller and brush.

It didn’t help that the temperature was in the upper 90’s every day while we were working on this project, but finally we got it finished!

We decided to leave the window frames on the back of our house unpainted. Even though I think they would look better painted black, I don’t mind the white as much since there is no stone on the back of the house.

I think the back of our house looks nice overall, especially now that we have finally completed our patio. I will be blogging about that project next!