Another TV stand makeover

Today I’m sharing another cabinet makeover, one of my first projects ever! Some of you may have seen these pictures before on my Facebook page. Still, for all of you who haven’t seen it before: check out this TV stand makeover. Such a difference!

This TV cabinet used to stand in our entrance hall for our cat to sit on while she was waiting for us to come home. When I decided to paint this piece, I had never thought that I would start a blog later and write about it, so I had to look really hard for some old photos of the ‘before’ state. These were taken during our movement, three years ago, just to give you some clue about what it looked like before:

Before

Before, in our entrance hall.

When I painted this cabinet I was determined to distress the paint a bit. Or at least give it a try. Distressing paint is perfect for people like me: I move furniture around a lot, and when I do it occasionally bumps into walls or other pieces of furniture. So you can imagine that new scratches and bumps will just add to the ‘aging’ effect. Also, it makes me feel more comfortable in our home since I don’t have to tiptoe around the place and carefully avoid any contact with super-shiny surfaces…

For starters, I sanded and primed the wood of course. I detached the doors and unscrewed the hinges first.

At that time I did a much more thorough job in ‘paint preparations’ than I do nowadays… Maybe it’s just practice, but it took me much longer then, than it does now. Practice makes perfect, they say. Or, in my case, just more experienced and efficient. Not perfect :).

As with some other projects I’ve painted this cabinet with two layers of lavender grey home-made chalk paint (you can check out my night stand makeover with DIY matte paint here, in Dutch). I just fell in love with this colour. Then, I transferred some cute Graphics Fairy images to the top and side of the cabinet using Art Medium (Mod Podge). If you want to give it a try, you can find my tutorial for Art Medium image transfer here.

Front view

After the transfer I had to lightly sand the surfaces and finish them with some clear varnish, to make the paint a bit more dirt-and-scratch-resistant, ánd to remove any visible remains of the transfer process. You will still see some lines after removing the paper, you know… right where the image has been pressed down onto the Art Medium.

To distress the piece a bit, I’ve sanded off the paint here and there and rubbed in some antiquing wax on the sanded spots to stain the wood.

And as finishing touch: replace the plain wooden doorknobs with some cute, metal handles. Just replacing doorknobs can make such a big difference, don’t you think?

There you go, one very different look for a worn-out TV stand!