I am busy redoing my cottage and there was a fairly large window that needed bars put on it. I'm not in favour of making a place look like a jail cell so I decided to make use of some old vintage burglar bars that were lying around.
I had three of these panels lying around, this one was the most rusty of them, the others weren't that bad, apart from the fact that they would need to be welded together, which would ruin the existing paintwork. I decided to go back to the beginning so I burnt all the paint off with a blowtorch and took a wire brush to them till I was down to clean metal.
I took other progress photos during the course of my project but I seem to have deleted them. Damn
After the welding was done, I cut and drilled flat bar to make lugs because my local hardware store didn't have any that were long enough.
After that, I put on a coat of primer and repainted them with enamel paint. Some drilling and large coach-screws and plugs to mount them to the wall and this is the result:
The view out of that window is fairly crappy so I had to photograph it from an odd angle, but, you get the idea.
It was quite labour-intensive to repurpose these old bars but I'm pleased with the result.