FILE CABINET MAKEOVER

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It was a year ago this month that I took my old putty colored file cabinet outside armed with a couple of cans of spray paint determined to make it white so it would fit with my new plan of taking the sliding doors off my craft room closet and making it pretty.  I was already putting down laminate and painting and new blinds (well, my handyman was, not me, no siree bob).
Well here is something I learned --- read the spray paint can, I know who does that?  It has a temperature range on the can for a reason, who knew?  It was hot out, around 100 degrees, I should have known better but rationalized that it was only June, if I waited for it not to be 100 degrees out I’d have to wait all summer.  That’s not true, but I wanted to do it NOW.
The spray paint stuck fine but it feels like sandpaper and wasn’t glossy, it was a rough matte finish.  I asked the guy in the paint department at OSH and he said it was the heat, duh!  So, I could sand it down and do it again or live with it.  For some reason it took me a year of living with it.  I wasn’t even really living with it, the entire contents were in 4 plastic tubs in the garage and the handles and label holders were in my desk drawer, that’s right FOR A YEAR!! 
Here she is right before I started on her.
File Cabinet (1)
I had ideas for a design on the drawers, triangles in the aqua I had painted inside the closet and on the ceiling, along with some gray and maybe black triangles.  My cousin provided with with an original design that I also considered which would be a whole lot easier to pull off than the triangles. 
Here are my choices.  As you can see I penciled in my triangles.  This is where it sat for many more months.  UNTIL….
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File Cabinet (3) File Cabinet (4)
Last week my friend and I went to some Goodwill Stores just looking around for something we couldn’t live without.  We stumbled across some stencils, some awesome unused stencils for .49 cents.  We snapped up all we could find digging through the piles of crap.  I put them away in my craft room planning to use them for some Gelli Plate backgrounds the next time I felt like making some art.
Then the light came on, one was a large birch tree stencil that I suddenly thought would look good on the drawers with gray paint as the trees on the stencil would remain the white of the stencil.
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I did some practicing on the side of the file cabinet that would be up against the wall so it wouldn’t show.  I tried a Sharpie and a Zig Painty Paint Pen when I was still considering the free form design.  Then I tried the stencil with a stencil brush and it was kind of swirly so I tried a foam roller and was happy that it didn’t bleed under too much as long as I kept it pretty dry.
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Here’s my professional paint palette, super cute paper plates from Big Lots.
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I put the carpet runner from the hall upside down on the floor just in case of any spills and drug her out of the closet and laid her down.  I could never figure out how to get the drawers out so she had to come out of the closet all in one piece.  The pieces of scrap wood were just so I wouldn’t get paint on the edges, I just wanted to paint the drawers.
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Not to bad if I do say so myself.
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Here she is with her handles and label holders back on and in her home in the closet.
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Friday Finds – Redwoods Plate

I found this souvenir plate at the Goodwill and can’t decide if I’m going to keep it or try to sell it on Ebay or Etsy.  When I was a child we very seldom, almost never, went anywhere.  My father never wanted to go anywhere and when we did we just “have to get there”, there was no stopping and sightseeing or just taking a road with an interesting sign to see what it was, no none of that, just had to “get there”.  It was the destination, not the journey, for him.  Anyway, the Redwoods was one of our rare vacations, so the plate has some meaning for me.  It, however, doesn’t go with anything in my house, was thinking of my kitchen, I just did a plate wall, but the color isn’t right since my plate wall is yellow and gray.  Maybe I’ll price it really high and see what happens, that way I’ll be able to keep it if it doesn’t sell.  How’s that for rationalization.