MORE CABINETS!

Some people are addicted to pickle onion flavoured Monster Munch, crack cocaine or botox facelifts, whilst others can’t get enough online bingo, fried chicken or fast cars but for me it’s cabinets.

Another vintage addition is currently in pieces on the lounge floor undergoing a Kafkaesque metamorphosis from coffee-cup ringed crappiness to upcycled utopia. As Depeche Mode once said “Just can’t get enough” and it’s so true, I really love doing these transformational projects!

Just can't get enough cabinets

This cabinet started life in another charity shop clearance corner priced at a tenner.

Darling, would you like to come back to my place?

Its condition was not quite as good as the last one. A veneered top covered in heat ring marks, door trims in danger of falling off and dinky dents everywhere.

Top ruined by ring marks and stains

Door veneer has seen better days

Door trims damaged and almost falling off

Little remains of the original woodwork that is salvageable without a great deal of restoration work so I’ve given the whole item the turquoise treatment to cover up all visible defects.

Primed

Painting the interior

Loving this colour. It’s called Sainte-Maxime from B&Q’s Good Home furniture paint range. It’s a lusciously rich peacocky blue/green, beautiful depth of tone after two coats and a perfect companion to metallic gold or copper paint.

Sainte Maxime furniture paint

What a glorious colour

Partnering my peacock paint is a strip of chinoiserie style paper featuring exotic long-tailed birds perched among delicate foliage. You can find this Boutique Biyu mint floral metallic effect wallpaper in B&Q for around £26 a roll.

Boutique Biyu mint floral wallpaper

The blue tail feathers on the birds are an almost perfect tonal match to the paint so together they look fabulous.

A lovely colour combination

Looks fabulous

Unlike the last cabinet that had black painted legs to correspond with black painted trims, I’ve pushed the boat out on this one and painted the legs all in gold to give it a real touch of opulent luxury.

Painting the legs gold

Now a word here on using gold furniture paint. As the lounge is currently my furniture workshop, spraying paint is out of the question which limits what I can use for these projects. Compared to the self-priming paint, I’ve found metallic furniture paint to be thinner in consistency and that means lots of coats are needed to get an even, rich finish. One website I visited suggested a clever way to achieve the metallic look but with less expense was to paint the first couple of coats in a similarly coloured matt paint first then finished off with a couple of coats of metallic paint. Worth considering for next time.

Lots of coats needed to get depth of colour

There is a small wooden trim on the inside of the glass side panels which I have also picked out in gold to add a little extra glamour to the interior. Very fiddly so super small artists brushes required for this bit.

Picking out the interior wood trims in gold paint

With the main cabinet body almost finished it’s now time to pull on some legwarmers, find a lap cat to snuggle under and let Shelby decide if my handiwork is up to scratch whilst the paint dries.