My Totally Awesome Cabinet/Table - Finished!

What would happen, you may wonder, if a cabinet and a table decided to hook up and have a baby?  And 30 years later that baby, down on its luck, feeling unloved, sits in a Goodwill for well over a month - neglected, scratched up, repeatedly faced with the question "What the heck is this?"  The price of $79.99 is eventually slashed to $34.99 and still no takers.


The "Before" - Goodwill evidently loves price tags.

Well, that my friend, would be the part of the story where I walk in and decide - "Yeah, this is an easy fix.  Just needs some wood filler and paint.  I can make money off of this."

Famous last words?  Let's hope not.



The "After" - Looks like a million dollars, even if its not styled, right?

 And expanded to a table:

Who doesn't need this in their house? I'm hoping it's the perfect solution for
someone, preferably someone who wants to give me money.

How did I get from the before to the after?  Let me tell you...

Totally ripping off Jenny's vision from Little Green Notebook, I first bought a can of Rustoleum "Safety Red" Enamel spray paint.  Silly me thought that at most I would maybe need 2 cans, but I wanted to try out the color first before committing to the second can.  At home, I removed the hardware and sanded the piece lightly.

The color was great - the coverage - not so much.  I'm not sure how much is due to:

1.) the fact that I read everywhere to do thin coats so much more was swirling around in the air than actually sticking to the furniture; or

2.) the fact that I hadn't primed, or

3.) a million other reasons.  But I quickly realized that it was going to take at least 4 more cans of this stuff and at $5+ a can, it was eating into my profit margin.

So I made my first big paint mistake.  At this point, if I could do it again, I would have simply bought a pint of Rustoleum "Safety Red" in the regular paint.  They sell it right next to the spray paint at my Lowes and it costs less than $9.  But no, I was loving the fact that, despite not doing that great of a job, the spray paint was quick and easy.  Yes, I did manage to paint half of the garage red despite tarping, but it only took like 5 minutes and you can recoat fairly quickly.  And no brush strokes/roller lines!  (This project came quickly on the heels of my last project - painting our dining room table about a zillion different coats in an effort to eliminate all roller lines and then finally deciding to live with a less-than-perfect-but-close-as-it-is-going-to-get finish.)

So I went back to Lowes and decided to grab 2 cans of Valspar's "Berry" spray paint.  It was less than $4 each.  Back home I went and used up both cans within a couple of minutes.  I loved the lacquered, professional look I was getting - unfortunately, I wasn't getting it everywhere.  Despite my best efforts, it was  looking splotchy, especially on the top.

Trip #3 to Lowes.  Decided that I would just bite the bullet and get the regular paint version of "Berry" and finish using a roller and brush.  Only, Valspar doesn't make "Berry" in a regular paint.  Why?  No idea, because it sounds ridiculous to me too.  After the paint guy couldn't match the color with his computer, I decided to risk it and bought Valspar's "Cherry" in glossy - hoping it would be close enough that I wouldn't have to repaint the entire thing - just the splotchy top.  In my spray-paint fume-filled head, this seemed like a good possibility - the names rhymed and everything.

Of course it didn't work out - the colors are similar, but not close enough to get away with.  So I gave the entire thing another coat and the table top got two coats for durability. 

Despite the five coats, there are still imperfections.  But, as I was prepping to do another coat today, I stepped back and thought, "No one else is going to notice this stuff except for me."  I put on the shined-up handles to double check and the imperfections quickly disappeared to me too.  At this point I have spent much more than I originally budgeted for paint, so I didn't want to keep bogging down my time as well.  I snapped some pictures and posted it to Craigslist.

Lets see if I get any bites...

Linking here