This used to be my living room wall. It was brown, plain, and boring. I had very little space to decorate, and what space there was seemed too small to really do much. So brown, plain, and boring it remained. For 4 years. I could never figure out how to make it look better with these 2 mismatched little things (the tv stand was the first piece of furniture I bought after college and the thing on the right opens and was my DVD and CD storage). And I didn't know what to do on the wall because it seemed like if I hung anything there it would be too high. Things hung too high on the wall is a big pet peeve of mine. A change was definitely needed.
So I got online to see if I could find an inexpensive piece of furniture to refinish, and this is my $20 find 
Perfect.
And by perfect I mean old, beat up, and ugly
with hideous brass hardware
But can you see the potential?
Look how much better it looks just with the handles taken off!
Who wants a bag of ugly brass handles? Yeah...didn't think so.
I sanded...
filled in 32 holes and started to prime...
and then switched from spray primer to regular paint. My trigger finger still reminds me how much we did not enjoy spray painting.
I mixed the color myself so I can't tell you what it's called. I bought this can of white paint and primer in one, and since I had a bunch of the wall color (Glidden Chatham Tan ~ the one my finger is on) left over from when I painted the living room and kitchen, I just mixed some in with the white to make an off-white kind of color. I actually did this a few months ago when I refinished my kitchen cabinets (I'll show you that before and after later) and I had enough left over to use it for this too. I LOVE the color, and the bonus of mixing my own paint is I didn't have to worry about coordinating it with the wall color.
After adding some new handles, here she is in all her refinished glory.
Doesn't this wall look so much better now? I'm loving the transformation.
Let's see the before again
and another after
Love it.
This was all I was planning to do, but now I'm not sure I'm done. There is a lot of space in the bottom/middle area. Stencil maybe? I picture something like one of these:
(I stole all of these pictures from Better After, a fabulously hilarious blog that will make you want to go right out and find something in the dumpster or on the side of the road to refinish)
Except none of these really. I can't find anything that's exactly what I have in mind. Something not too bold but not too subtle to fill in that space. In my mind I see something swirly or damask in grey. What do you think?
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5 comments:
Great steal! Look at all that storage! Go for the stencil, I think it'll look great, and if it doesn't, you can just paint over it, right? Thanks for sharing at Etcetorize~
I love how this turned out! I have a hutch sitting in my garage that I'm planning to turn into a console like this. Thank you for the inspiration!
Your console looks great!! I just refinished a console too!! Love yours!
What a great makeover and now you have a ton more storage! I'm excited to see what stencil you decide to do. Thanks for sharing!
oh my gosh, that turned out great! good job! now you just need to get a nice flat screen tv to go on top. i like it how it is without the stenciling, but then again i'm a minimalist.
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