Trash to Treasure

About 13 years ago, when I was 20, I bought a piece of unfinished furniture from a local store similar to Target (Ames - anyone remember Ames?).  It's really a piece of bathroom storage - a floor cabinet to put towels, toilet paper, and toiletries in.  It was cheap and we needed storage in our bedroom, so even though we weren't intending to use it in the bathroom, I bought it anyway.  Remember how I said I was only 20?  Well, I had no clue what primer was.  I painted it with a coat of white paint and was very disappointed that all the knots (and there are a lot) showed through.  I decided to spruce it up by decoupaging some photos of our pets and our vacations on to the door.  Now, because I was only 20, I'd never heard of decoupage before.  So I just cut out the photos and glued them on with Elmer's.  And I was pretty damn proud of myself.

Of course, 13 years later, this piece of furniture was not so much a piece I was proud of, but something I sort of hated.  I was sentimentally attached to the photos since most of those pets had since died, but oy, was this cabinet ugly.  So when I finally had the impulse to try to scrape those pictures off, I seized the opportunity, knowing I'd change my mind if I didn't do it right away.

But DIY with four kids around is sometimes difficult.

It eventually got to the point where I just had to admit that I was not going to be able to scrape all those pictures off.  Not totally because of the kids, either, but because I couldn't get the Elmers glue off without wasting a ridiculous amount of time.  So I came up with a plan to cover up the pictures.

I went to Joann's and got a yard of pretty home decor fabric that matched my bathroom (lots of blue tiles, white crappy wallpaper that needs to be removed, and some brown accents).  I also got a big piece of poster board.  Back home, I cut the poster board to fit the inset panels, then sprayed them with adhesive.  I stuck them to the wrong side of the fabric and cut the fabric with about a two inch margin around the poster board.  Then I covered the back with spray adhesive and folded the margins onto the back of the poster board.  Voila, fabric panels to cover my crappy photo-Elmers mess.  A little more spray adhesive and Voila!   New cabinet!  Oh, not to mention the two coats of primer and two coats of Behr's Parchment I had left over from painting the fireplace.

Unfortunately, I still needed more storage, so I got two wicker baskets from Home Goods and screwed them to the wall.  Or rather, my husband screwed them to the wall.

 Doesn't it look great?  And more importantly, this project enabled me to re-do my disaster of a foyer!  That'll be the subject of another post.