Free Cabinet Renovation

I'll admit it, I'm addicted to watching the free section on Craigslist. I see dogs, cats, ferrets, rats, firewood, free garages and manure and occasionally furniture. It goes quickly though. This is the first thing that I've ever actually gotten for free:

It's a laminated piece with a pretty dinged up top.

I'm not a huge fan of the door.

Check out that drink tray! :-)

It clearly needed some TLC. I just happened to stop at a furniture restoration shop in our little town called This Old Couch on my way home from picking up my new treasure. I got to talking to the shop owner, and she showed me a few projects that she was working on. One of them had wrapping paper mod podged to the top that she then scuffed up to give it more of an antique look. I immediately thought of this project sitting in the car. I've never mod podged before, but I thought I'd give it a try. I removed the door, and then I used the paper on the interior and top and painted the sides with my Sherwin Williams ProClassic Semi-Gloss in Dover White. I can't say that it's perfect, but hey, this was free and a great thing to try it on. If and when I grow tired of this piece, I won't feel badly parting with it because it cost me a total of $7 in materials and not that much in terms of time. I did end up trying a bit of antiquing on this piece. I used some sand paper to scuff it up a bit and the used both a wipe on stain and some shoe polish to mark it up. I covered the top with three coats of wipe on poly and moved it up to use as my side table while I work on refinishing a different side table for myself. I'll ultimately move this into the guest bedroom or maybe between the couches in the living room. I think it would be a good place to place extra blankets and it has the pull out drink tray.

My basement refinishing area

In place next to the bed. I don't have anything on it yet as I want to let the polyurethane cure. 

You can see some of the antiqued look in this picture.

And just for a fun master bedroom update to finish this post, I hung some art work finally and moved the other refinished side table to Joe's side of the bed. Last night he said that he really liked it there! Yay!