Office Cubbies {Reurbished}

One of my favorite things to see is an old, ugly piece of furniture given a face lift. I knew I wanted some cubbies in my workroom the second my husband said the room was mine. So, I searched online stores, thrift stores, and Craigslist extensively till I could find something in (or under) my budget. Eventually I found a school on Craigslist that was selling their old school cubbies. We picked them up at the school, and I thought they were a good deal at $15 a piece. Then came the long, hard, relentless, exhausting part of it all... Painting them!!

Here are what the cubbies looked like when I got them home. I cleaned them up, wiped them down, and prepped the area to get ready to paint.

Now, I know I should have known better, but I did buy paint from Walmart for this. I will never do that again! Each cubby took over 1 hr to paint, per coat, due to all the corners and awkward angles in the cubbies. Here is what cheap paint looks like (I actually think my iphone pics don't even show how translucent the paint really was). Below on the left is the cubby painted with one coat all over and two coats in all the edges. On the right is three coats on everything...

Here is what they looked like after four or five coats. Like I said, the iphone pic isn't very clear so it's hard to tell, but there is no smoothness or consistency in the paint, it was very blotchy with tons of paint brush lines. This is where I caved. After using nearly an entire gallon of cheap, Walmart paint, I went to Home Depot and purchased a gallon of Behr Premium Plus Ultra paint. At this point one cubby had 4-5 coats (seen below) of paint and the other had 1-2 coats (above left), both cubbies only needed one additional coat of the Behr paint to cover them sufficiently. I've learned my lesson.

And here they are! This picture was not taken with my iphone, it was taken by my friend, Kristin.

Here's the breakdown:

Cubbies- $30.00 (total)

Cheap paint from Walmart- $20.00 (I can't remember the price, but whatever it was, it's a waste of $$)

Behr Premium Plus Ultra- $33.00

Misc supplies, drop cloth, paint pans, small brush- $15.00

Total= $98