



This one was quite a transformation and took me a while to actually get it right.. I found this little cabinet totally abandoned, left outside, no one wanted it.. It looked quite nice and I fell in love with the door knob, which was so pretty.. I thought if cannot rescue the cabinet, at least I will have a nice little door knob for my future projects..

The little cabinet was left outside to rot and it almost did.. thankfully I found it just in time as otherwise the moisture would have gotten to it and it would have been ruined..

I cleaned the cabinet with some soapy water and dried it completely before cleaning it again. I made sure I dried it straight away. The cabinet was clean but there was still this horribly musty smell when I opened the door. I went to research on the internet how to get rid of this smell.

There were various different suggestions from putting onions in the cabinet, bicarbonate soda to using lavender sachets. I kept reading and thought would try out the coal, bicarbonate soda and the gel dehumidifier options. So I placed some coal inside the cabinet and left it there for a few days. What these three items did was soak up the moisture. The coal did work but not quick enough. So I purchased some of the gel dehumidifiers and placed one inside for a good few days and was so surprised when I checked on it about a week later – the tray had so much water in there and the smell had gone! I did another clean of the cabinet and it was ready to be sanded and primed.

For this project I thought I would use the white emulsion in eggshell finish as I thought it would look nice in our bathroom. As I was priming the cabinet I knew I was in trouble, because the wood was bleeding so bad it looked horrible orangey colour on the sides and was so uneven.. Once the paint was dry I applied some Ronseal stain block and let it dry overnight. The next day you could still see the stains but only slightly, so I sanded a little and put an extra coat of the stain block. I think it did the trick – phew!

As I was having such a nightmare with priming the cabinet, I decided to still paint the cabinet, but use some wallpaper to cover most of the areas. As I had some wallpaper left I chose to use this Graham & Brown Juliet wallpaper in cream, it has a lovely golden shimmer on it.

I used mod podge to attach the wallpaper. All you need to do is cover the area where you want the wallpaper to go with mod podge, then put the wallpaper on top and using an old credit card just smooth over the area to get rid of any air bubbles. Then put a layer of mod podge over the top. I sanded the sides of the cabinet so that the wallpaper would blend in with the paint and touched up with white paint where necessary.

Once the wallpaper is dry, you can either put another layer of mod podge or use some clear varnish and paint over the wallpaper to give it an extra seal. As this was going in the bathroom I put 2 layers of mod podge and a layer ov varnish on top.

To finish off the cabinet I decided to put a nice glass knob on the door and keep the original for one of my future projects.

This is what it looked like after it was done.

I realised I had a nice white basket which would fit perfectly on the little shelf, so it ended up looking even better!

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