Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Coral Cabinetry

Hello Darlings! I have made a few adjustments to the blog since my last post. I decided to go for a cleaner more streamlined look. I'm sticking with a white background right now just so that the posts are easier to read and so I can make each post a bit wider.  I don't have the width constraints I did before.  So today's post has been a long time in the making! This project has been done for about a month now, but I am finally getting around to posting.  We had lost our camera charger and cord in our move from Virgina, but finally have found a replacement!


So when we first moved in, we quickly realized that we had on ginormous wall to fill, so I knew we would need a very specific entertainment center. 

I didn't want to wait forever to find one because we where really ichting to get settled in.  We went to a great place around here that sells second hand furniture.  Over the years, my family has found a lot of great steals there. 

We came across a 3 piece bookshelf/entertainment center. Each piece was priced separately but I talked the hubby into buying all 3 pieces because I knew this was the one! 
 The whole thing came out to be a little under $300, but I know it's something that we can take with us when we move and separate the pieces if we need to depending on the size and space of the different places we live. 

The whole set is solid cherry wood.  
This is the center unit. 





 And these are the two side cabinets.

 

I decided I was going to take on the tedious task of painting the whole set a bright white.  Painting solid cherry wood white, easy right? 

WRONG! 

This is the center cabinet with one coat of Kilz primer.

 I used a foam roller and very high quality paint brush for the whole project.

Here are all of my pieces with one coat of primer. This took about one day. 

There were a never ending about of shelves to prime and paint, both sides of! 

For my next step of painting, I used Color Place interior semi-gloss paint. This stuff is great. It goes on well, and it's easy to clean.
  
The white paint took about 4 coats before all the cherry was completely covered.  I let each coat dry a full day and night in between with fans blowing on them so they could cure completely between each coat.


Needless to say, this took...awhile. Remember all those shelves? Yeah, all 12 of them got 4 coats on both sides too. 

I then taped off the back of each of the book shelf pieces. 


I then used Behr's Youthful Coral for the back of each of the bookshelves for a pop of color!



Here are the backs of each bookshelf with the coral. I think it helps to make this bookshelf a little more Happy!


Then I had this great idea to stencil the backs of each of the bookshelves in this Moroccan tile.

Turned out to be a wee bit sloppy.

And this loveliness right here? Yea, um this took me  4 hours. And that's only like 12% of what needed to be done, if I was going to go through with it.
See? I decided it was going to be too busy anyways, knowing that I wanted to put things on the shelves. 
 

So, although I literally shed a tear after all that hard work, I painted over it.

After all the paint has cured up nicely, we moved it out into our living room. I put the shelves on and started to play around with how I wanted it to look.

Here it is with all the shelves in. There are also 2 more shelves in the cabinet part. 

Someone was pretty stoked to have a cool little place to hang out in.

So after fussing with the shelves and getting them just right, it was finally time to accessorize!
(P.S. I had to rip my husband away from precious Xbox time to get this picture. That's why there is a wire hanging down. Nothing I could do about it. It COULD NOT be unplugged! So yeah.) 



I will show how I accessorized everything in my next blog post!