DIY Project of the Week-File Cabinet Redo

OK, let’s get real.  I’m probably not going to do an amazing DIY project every week-but I had to have a title y’all! At the very least it will encourage me to get those projects done (I hope).  We recently redid our basement. I mean we went from creepy 70s murals (prior owner) to an awesome, pristine basement area with hardwood floors and cute trim!  I’ve got a lot of my household type files down there, that’s where I pay bills and get my wifely projects done.  I needed a filing cabinet but just didn’t love most of the options out there. I needed a BIG tall filing cabinet but even at our new Ikea they were not cheap.  So here’s what I found:

Needless to say the standard black filing cabinet was not the look I’m going for-not with EVERYTHING else totally redone in our basement. Notice the dog in the bottom of the photo overseeing our project. He likes to help out-such a good kid.

We got the filing cabinet for free at my father in law’s office-he was going to chuck it out so we took it. And it does have kind of a dent in one side, but since it was free ninety-nine I don’t really care! I decided to redo this bad boy-and here are the steps. We sanded the whole cabinet and gave it a full coat of metal primer.

Honestly even that is better than it looked originally haha. Hubby then painted the front of each cabinet with some mod podge glue watered down enough to make it paintable with a paint brush.

I had decided I wanted to use some leftover fabrics to cover the front of each drawer, so I cut them about an inch larger on each size than the size of the cabinet. More on what to do with the extra fabric later. We attached the fabric to the front and used the paint brush (painting outwards from the middle) to get the fabric totally flat and adhered well.

We continued on down the front of the file cabinet.

By the way isn’t Mr. Fleuriste just darling?! Love that man 🙂 Any man who can do crafts gets extra points in my book. Moving on. Here’s how the cabinet looked after we finished the whole fabric-attachment-to-the-front portion.

Now the next step for me (because I’m SO instant gratification) was to go ahead and replace the hardware. I initially wanted to upgrade to new hardware but, at the end of the day, its just the filing cabinet and I didn’t want to spend any extra money. Basically the whole project so far was free so I was kind of hoping to keep it that way. Here’s what we got when we replaced the hardware.

And this.

And this and this.

I mean its REALLY hard to be a dog in our house-clearly.  Next time I’ll show you the finished outcome of the project-but we’re making excellent progress!

Happy New Year Y’all!