Another Finish: Filing Cabinet Makeover

 Good morning!  (It's 11am here)

I have another project that I just finished.  This one is for the office area of my room.  I took my ugly filing cabinet and made it pretty!

Here's the beige, boring, beat-up, before:

At this stage, I had already removed the handles and label frames.  If you look closely, you can see the little slider buttons are still there.  I didn't like them and didn't want to bother painting them so I removed them.

No matter how much I Googled it, I couldn't find directions on how to get rid of them so I just stared at them from the inside until I figured it out.  For my cabinet, you had to slide the button to the right to unlatch the drawer so you could open it.  I'll admit, my floors are uneven and slope slightly to the rear of the cabinet, so I don't have to worry about the drawers just coming open.

I didn't think to take photographs, so I'll try to explain it.  The button slid to the right to release a bracket on the inside left of the drawer.  The bracket and button were connected to the drawer with a spring.  Removing the spring was easy and I did that first.  The button was attached to the bracket with a little piece of metal that looked like this \.  I took a pair of vice grips, adjusted their jaws to a little smaller than that piece and clamped them around it.  A simple twist broke the piece and the button came off the front of the drawer.  All I had to do was then jockey the bracket out.  It was an L-shaped piece, so it just needed a little bit of maneuvering.

I used Krylon Chalky White paint to paint the beige away.  It took three coats.  I gave the handles and label frames a fresh coat of silver paint.  I used Rustoleum metallic silver.  I didn't paint the entire drawer fronts but did make sure to paint a border of at least 1" on all of them.

Instead of painting the drawer fronts (all white would have been too boring still), I decoupaged scrapbooking paper on them.  The drawers are 11.375" x 13.5" so regular 12" x 12" scrapbooking paper needed to be trimmed so I'd have an even border around the paper.

I haven't decoupaged anything in decades, so I started with the bottom drawer because it's the hardest to see closely - in case I messed it up.  :-)

I didn't have 4 sheets of identical paper that I liked, so I opted for 4 different, coordinating pieces.  While the whole room is white with dark blue-gray trim, the sewing area has an accent of Tahitian Breeze (sea-glass green).  The office area ended up with a purple accent.  That wasn't really planned, but I like it.  Because of that, I chose purple scrapbook papers.

Well, you've made it this far so here's the finished project:

I do still have to make labels for the drawers.  Maybe I'll do that today.  Basically everything in the cabinet is related to my genealogy research.  Photos, paternal side, maternal side, research/correspondence, etc.

Happy Stitching!

Stacy