My Passion For Decor: The Yellow Cabinet Makeover

I'm happy to be sharing this project with you today!

Last year a neighbor offered to give me a cabinet she had sitting in her garage collecting dust. Of course I said, "Yes!" and then the cabinet sat waiting in the garage for me to get around to making it pretty.

I don't do much work in the winter, because it gets cold here in Illinois in the winter. I work in my garage and it's not heated (hopefully some day it will be!). We've had a nice stretch of weather lately so I figured it was time to attempt a makeover on this yellow cabinet. I'm calling it a yellow cabinet, but it's a dresser with doors and drawers on the inside on top and two drawers on the bottom.

Here's some pictures of what the cabinet looked like before.

You can see in this picture, there a lot of paint drips and LOTS of layers of paint underneath. It was structurally sound, which was a huge bonus, but it was going to take a lot of work to get it looking pretty again.

The first thing I did was use Citristrip and strip all the layers of paint off the top of the cabinet. I chose to only strip the top down, otherwise I would have been working on this cabinet for weeks. I stripped off 7 layers of different colored paint before I reached the beautiful wood top!

I sanded down the rest of the cabinet to remove the drip marks and other blemishes. I soon learned I would need to embrace the imperfections rather than attempt to fix them.

Here's how it looked with the stop stripped, sanded and stained.

I added a coat of Chalk Paint™ decorative paint by Annie Sloan in Old White. I painted Just a light, quick coat, to try and neutralize all the different colors a bit. There was avocado green, white, black mustard yellow, another shade of green...you get the point!

After the coat of Old White dried, I used one of my favorite Annie Sloan blue Chalk Paint™ colors, Aubusson Blue. I painted the cabinet with two coats of Aubusson Blue then let it dry a few hours. I came back in and waxed with Annie Sloan clear wax. Then went to work with my orbital sander.

There were so many imperfections in the many coats of paint, that I had to live with them and let a few show through. I sanded and sanded, added a bit more Aubusson Blue, then waxed again until I finally had the look I was hoping for.

I sealed the top with dark wax, added new crystal drawer knobs from Hobby Lobby and I was done.

Here's how the once ugly yellow cabinet looks now!