An Updated Filing Cabinet

With a week or so  of downtime on the house renovations, I decided to start tackling some smaller projects. My office was having to get rid of these old black filing cabinets:

And just before we tossed them, I remembered the current state of mine and Richard's important documents.. 

My co-workers were more than happy to have me take the old cabinets off their hands and I was ecstatic to have a free filing cabinet to work on (I had no idea these things were so expensive in the store!) 

 I started brainstorming on what I wanted to do with them- I knew didn't want to invest too much time or money (these are just filing cabinets, after all), but I did want to update them a little to hide some of the scratched paint and make them fit in better in our house. 

For quite sometime I have been wanting to try out some of the less expensive brands of chalk paint (I had only used Annie Sloan up to this point) and this was the perfect opportunity. I picked out THIS chalk paint in "Nautical" from Joann Fabrics, and with a 50% off coupon, it was less than $5! I also picked up some gold spray paint for the hardware. 

Within 1 afternoon, this project was completely done- and less than $10 invested, I was a happy camper. I did spray paint a primer on, which I am pretty sure was completely unnecessary and gave it three coats of the chalk paint. I used a small foam roller for the paint because I didn't want to see any brush strokes. I was able to paint the whole cabinet with just one of the small jars of paint and still had a little left over. My review of the paint: worked great for this project. I didn't sand down at all, so it isn't a super smooth surface, but I love the color and it went on really smooth. I will definitely be trying this brand again in the future. 

Is it perfect? Far from it.. but that doesn't bother me. I didn't use a top coat on the chalk paint because I wanted a very matte finish, so it does show imperfections, but I am fine with that. Can't sweat the small stuff.. and in the scheme of projects going on in our house right now, a filing cabinet is most definitely small. Navy and gold might be my all time favorite color combination, so looking at this little cabinet brings me joy! But you know what makes me even happier? 

Seeing this:

Turn in to this:

Thinking about having to find something in that jumbled pile of papers before would be enough to send me into a meltdown, but now everything has its own little home. Not to mention, I got to grown up "school supply" shopping (does anyone else miss school supply shopping trips as much as I do?) And of course I had to pick up the 20 pack of fine point sharpies while I was there..(they were 50% off.. can you blame me?)

Well that wraps up this little project! In between all of the chaos happening at our house, I love working on smaller projects that make me feel like I have accomplished something. It's easy to get overwhelmed when the larger scale renovations have a longer timeline and it feels like no progress is being made. 

Thanks for reading- on to the next project!! (Cabinet demo part 2 will be done this weekend and I will be updating soon!)