Prettying up the bomb shelter

Our backyard has a unique feature - a bomb shelter.  Yes, a real bomb shelter.  Interesting fact: it is several years older than our house, and this is the only house that has ever been on this lot.

When we purchased the house, this is what the bomb shelter lid looked like:

The lid is made of sheet metal that has been nailed to the wooden lid underneath.  In the years since it was built it has done a great job, but is starting to rust in places... generally where the nails poke through.  There is now a small apple tree blocking the view of the ventilator shaft from the patio.  Last summer, this whole area was covered in squash vines that came up from the apple tree's compost, so it made getting to the lid at all a little difficult. This year, we decided to make a more permanent fix to the rust issue before any squash came up.

First, Ryan had to remove the old nails and replace them with screws.  Ordinarily, this wouldn't be necessary, but several of them jutted up.  Rowan actually got stuck sitting on it once, because her pants were caught.  Ryan wondered why she was sitting so quietly, until he noticed she kept trying to get up and couldn't.  So, in the interests of not imprisoning our baby (at least, not on top of the bomb shelter), the nails had to go.

Next, he sprayed the lid with a coating to stop the spread of rust.  He's asleep right now, so I don't know what it was called, but he'll edit this post later).  (Ryan: It's called "Rust Reformer," and actually converts the rust into something not rust plus a black paintable surface... like rust primer.)  When he was done, it looked like this:

Also, notice how much nicer the ground around it looks with gravel.

Silicone time.  In order to protect the wood (you can't see it, but the metal covers a very very heavy wooden lid), he siliconed the holes around the screws and remaining nails (I used a paintable silicone).

He primered it next.  (Ryan: I used Elastek's High Tech Base Coat for applying elastomeric roof coatings... I figured, if it was good for roofs, it'd be great for the bomb-shelter lid.)  I forgot to take a picture, so imagine the whole lid white.

And then we broke out the spray paint, and, two cans later, it was done:

Now we have the prettiest bomb shelter in the neighborhood.

The gravel is much pinker than it looks in this picture, so it actually looks really nice.  It just isn't obvious in the picture because the gravel is really dusty and there wasn't great light.