I vaguely remember it. The memories whisper in the corners of my mind. The evidence is all over the house.
There was once a time when I enjoyed buying junk furniture and making it awesome.
Then along came Alexis and she carried with her a giant black hole that sucks up time. As she's gotten older, I have slowly managed to shrink that black hole, to the point that now I have about an hour per evening to do something. Anything. It might be hanging out with Alexis, but it might be a return to the glory days or cheap furniture acquisition.
Just because I wish I had been blogging when I did this, let me just show you my most favoritest furniture redo. It started out as a horrific pine entertainment center that was marked down at Hills when the store was closing. It was so hideous that it was still there when prices were slashed to 75% off. When I was done painting and staining and painting and gluing, it ended up looking like this:
Sexy, no? Check out the details:
I love that thing.
What I didn't love was this thing:
That is a china cabinet that we bought many moons ago at IKEA. It was an As Is purchase that I hated, but knew that it could be made into something better. Oh, and when I say "many moons," I mean I can't even blame Alexis for the fact that it wasn't painted. I think it may have taken me 10 years ...or more ... to get around to it. Maybe. GET OFF MY LAWN. WHIPPERSNAPPER.
While you're getting off of my lawn, take Cody with you. When he was a puppy, he did this to it:
Apparently, ugly IKEA furniture tastes good because he chewed the crap out of that thing.
Anyway, I can finally say it has been given a new life. While I may eventually beat it up some more (to make it look even older), I'm pretty happy with where it's at right now.
The first thing I did to it was beat it up. No, seriously, I took a hammer and some nails and gouged and poked and banged until it had some really fun dents. Then I dug up some acrylic paint I had sitting around and gave it the once over.
Isn't it lovely? Heh. That was just a primer coat. It's red and black and splotchy because I was intentionally screwy with the paint. I knew you wouldn't actually be able to see the base coat, but the personality of it would show.
The next thing I did was coat the entire thing with the bright white paint we had sitting around. It was a $5 dented can of Behr ultra white, meaning it wasn't the color I would have liked to use, but it was here and it had almost no value to me. I used some crackle effect junk before putting the white paint on, so it wound up looking like this:
I left the inside black because the goal was for the inside to just sort of not exist. I want whatever I put into the cabinet to be the star of the show, and for the shelves to just go away.
It was a little too ultra white for my taste at that point, so I went over the entire thing with a tan sort of paint, wiping the majority of the paint off as I went.
Here's the before the "staining" with the tan paint:
And here's with the tan paint on it:
(The sides are still ultra white in the pic)
And here's how it looked after I wiped most of the tan paint off:
It just sort of muted the white a bit and added a little bit of character. Then I took an electric sander to the whole thing, wearing off the paint on some edges and otherwise "flattening" the china cabinet.
So then I had this on my hands:
I had one last thing left to do. One MAJOR thing. You know how IKEA furniture has that crappy laminate stuff on the back? That stuff that doesn't really take paint? I knew better than to fight with that stuff, so I went a totally different route.
I wallpapered it.
Isn't she lovely? For the record, the lights were inside when I started. The husband did that part years and years and years ago. Oh, and don't tell The Twitter you have discovered a love for wallpaper. Twitter is VERY anti-wallpaper and will FLIP OUT.
(Suck it, twitter. I told you I knew what I was doing. ;-) I'm still trying to figure out which room of the house I could wallpaper, by the way. Seriously. Go ahead and flip out over THAT.)
So that's the final product. A purdy, beat up, old looking cabinet that has sexy wallpaper on the back.
Now I just have to get the rest of the dining room to catch up with the "new" cabinet.