My mom is always passing on items from her home to mine. Whenever I go home I usually come home with twice the amount of stuff that I arrived with. She will ask me if I want a certain item, and of course I say "sure" and then I get home and think, "what am I going to do with this"? My husband is a good sport, he just shakes his head and rolls his eyes. Such is the item today. She gave this to me 3 years ago and it has been in my garage collecting dust and getting in the way.
Now that I am in a new home I have a place for it, not what it was originally intended for but I think it will work.
It is a potato/onion bin. Potatoes are to go in the top and onions in the bottom.
I took it apart. Yes, honey I took the hinges off but had to leave one of the knobs on because it was glued in. I also sanded it to rough up the surface so it would accept the paint. My husband is forever giving me grief for taking short cuts on my painting projects.
Then I dragged out my Cricut. LOVE THIS THING. So much fun. I do need to invest in more cartridges though. I am using this to cut words out for a stencil on the doors. Instead of using paper I used contact paper. It is cheap and if you make a mistake it is no big deal. I cut out a couple of options of fonts and sizes to get an idea of how I wanted it to look.
I decided on the tall skinny font for my project.
Pealed of the back an stuck them on the door/lid. I am the queen of "eye balling" it. My husband on the other hand would have had the tape measure and ruler out, positioning and repositioning making sure it is perfectly placed.
Sidebar: Don't know if you have ever listened to Jeanne Roberts. She is absolutely hysterical when if comes to talking about her husband "Left Brain". You have got to watch this
video of her sending her husband to the grocery store. I have seen it more than a dozen times and still laugh every single time.
I then used black paint with primer and rolled the top the lids and box completely covering it. This is with just one coat of paint. It took two coats with drying time in between each coat of paint.
Painting done, now it is drying. Did not take to long to dry. Notice that I did not do the inside of the box.
With the paint dry I carefully removed the contact paper stencil.
Next step is I used a fine grit sanding block to take the paint off the corners to give it the aged look.
This picture shows the words before I applied stain to the raw wood. I used Minwax cherry stain. Applied it with a rag and rubbed it off with another. The one mistake I made was because I was worried that it would have a inconsistent finish on the corners I rubbed the stain over the whole box. It stained the raw wood where I sanded but it made the black portion a little tacky. I ended up wiping the whole thing with a wet rag to get off the excess.
I put it all back together and it is now in my powder room holding toilet paper and reading material. The lighting of my photos make it the finish look uneven and shiny in areas. It looks much better in person.
