DIY Fun

A friend and I have been making a habit of visiting thrift shops and we found some cool old shutters at the Good Cents store. (if you haven’t visited this store – it’s pretty awesome. Everything is SO cheap – usually just cents! Just remember to bring hand sanitizer, you’re going to get a good layer of grime on you from sifting through bins of stuff. Worth it, though!) We got them without a clue what to do with them, but after some thinking – we came up with a pretty neat idea, if I may say so myself! DVD holders!

The shutters looked exactly like this: (though these are not our shutters. I wasn’t sure how this would turn out and I neglected to take a “before” photo – the shame!)

We hit the hardware store and chose 2 colors – I chose a cocoa brown for the base color and a sky blue for the top color. We cleaned all the grime off the shutters, then spray painted the base color and allowed it to dry. We topped it with the top color and gave it a good long time to dry. Sanding when still tacky is a bad idea. After a couple hours, we got some sand paper sponges and just went for it! We were worried about being too rough and taking off too much paint, but we quickly realized that the rougher we were, the cooler it looked!

The final product:

I need to do a bit more sanding on the top and right side, but I’m really happy with how they turned out so far! I’ll have to get a picture of Leah’s later, she chose really awesome colors – teal on the bottom and a smokey blue on top.

What I would do next time is beat them up a bit more before painting them. Get some good dents in the wood – when you sand over the dents, it gives it a really neat look!

I love it. We also got a huge bag of old clothes from the salvation army for $20! Who knew that Friday was “fill the bag day”? All you can fit in a big paper bag for $20 – we got 33 things! That’s 60 cents a piece! Keep an eye out for more posts about what we do with those clothes. We started with some huge polka dot shirts that we are almost done re-making into some adorable collared tank tops! 🙂