Several weeks ago, I embarked on making my paint cabinet look nicer and be a bit more inaccessible to my cats. For the past several months, I’ve been using a nailed-together cabinet that a friend found on the curb. It’s obviously a homemade job, possibly assembled from old crates, and held together with nails rather than screws. It was stained blue and filthy, but you’ll have to trust me on that because I forgot to take a picture of it in its found state. Here’s what it looked like after I cleaned it, knocked down a 10-inch-high box that was nailed to the bottom (a good place for cats to hide and get covered in dust, but not a good storage space) and coated what remained in primer:
I had a door that I pulled off a broken cabinet on the curb last summer. I had been planning to use it as a picture frame but decided instead to use it as the door for my paint cabinet. Here it is before paint and after masking tape:
The door was the perfect height for the cabinet, but not quite wide enough. However, some futon slats I had leftover from a shelf-building project were the perfect width to fill the gap:
I filled holes, primed everything and gave it two coats of glossy white, then covered the inside of the door with clear, bevel-style contact paper (leftover from training my cats to stay off the kitchen counter) and screwed on a handle that I picked up somewhere a few years ago – maybe the Habitat Restore, but just as likely the curb. Here’s what I ended up with:
Not a work of art, but nice enough to go in a living space.