Hello and Happy Friday!!! I am sitting on my couch right now doing what every normal millennial baby would do and I am putting off some major cleaning by writing this post. Cleaning is so not my fav, but this little abode definitely needs a good bath. So if you haven’t already heard this I just recently moved into my first home (post coming soon to tell you about my roller coaster house journey) and the good news of the day is.. All the moving is finished!! No more moving! YAY. Only cleaning 🙄. The second set of good news is: I finished my first DIY project! My Mom and I have always had this weird obsession with peddlers malls, flea markets, and yard sales because there is just so much cheap crap (classy description alert)!! And where there is cheap crap there is great potential. And I love potential.
My Mom is actually responsible for finding this little gem of a tv cabinet at a yard sale for $15.00. It actually had a nice black finish before this picture, and I could have kept it the way that it was but y’all know me I am always itching for a project.
Thank goodness I have parents who don’t mind letting me use their garage and who help out with every hair-brained idea I have! I don’t know what I would do! The very first thing that we did to this little baby was sand it down. It’s very important when you are redoing a piece of furniture to sand thoroughly because that allows you to get a smooth surface that paint will actually stick to.
The next thing that we did was remove all of the doors and the drawer so it would be easier to paint each individual piece. We thoroughly cleaned the whole cabinet, because any time you sand furniture you end up with a fine layer of dust all over everything. Paint needs a clean, dry surface to adhere to so we used a cloth rag and lightly soaped water to make sure every surface was dust free. Now comes the fun part: painting. Now we SHOULD HAVE started with a primer and I will tell you why later, but we just went ahead and started painting with a base coat of eggshell. I chose Sherwin Williams Grizzle Gray SW7068 for this piece.
So this is what the cabinet looked like after about two coats. There was only one problem… The paint was literally peeling off. If you ever put glue on your hand as a kid and let it dry and then peeled it, that exact thing was happening to this cabinet. It was gross, and gummy peeling. Nastayyyy. So I went and talked to a paint specialist at Lowes, and he told me that I had to just start over again, sand the whole thing down and prime first. Well, unfortunately, I am not that patient. Never have been. I expect I never will be. So I went home and started researching what I could do instead. There were no answers to be found. So I got out a piece of sandpaper and started sanding any place where the gummy peels were. I decided I would distress it by sanding any place that was appearing to peel off. My cousin Josh got lassoed’ into the project and we sanded until we got a relatively smooth surface. Then I went to Lowes and bought a can of Wipe on Poly. Polyurethane is a stain that helps protect any painted furniture by giving it a nice solid finish. It is like armor for your paint, and it worked. It hardened the surface of my cabinet, and it stopped peeling completely!! It also gave it a nice shiny finish. So instead of having a completely gray cabinet, I ended up having a gray, distressed cabinet and I absolutely loved it. It was a beautiful disaster 😏.
The next step in the process was to put everything back together. As you can see I switched out the knobs. Hobby Lobby has the best collection of knobs and drawer pulls I have ever seen! I chose the beaded edge knob with a jeweled center which you can purchase or view by clicking on the photo below. This particular knob can be bought for $7.99, but I got mine on a sale. Hobby Lobby has sales seriously all the time. So. Check. That. Out.
So overall I spent about $45 redoing this cabinet after buying the cabinet, paint, wipe on poly, and knobs. I am so happy with the end results! We had a lot of hiccups with this furniture flip, but it ended up turning out even better in spite of them. So if you are planning on having a little furniture flip yourself in the near future remember three things: 1) For the love of all that’s holy PRIME FIRST 2) Don’t be afraid of mistakes. Sometimes you stumble upon something beautiful. 3) Wipe on Poly. Buy it.
I hope you have a wonderful day!! I am going to go because I need to get my little rear end off of this death trap of a couch and clean. Wish me luck. I am going in.
Xoxo,
Megan Marie
