I love boxes!
More specifically I love boxes with drawers! Big boxes, little boxes, wide boxes, narrow boxes…as long as they have drawers, I love them! I’ve been wanting to do a large jewelry box makeover for a long time.
I found this old jewelry box
on FaceBook Marketplace and knew right away I needed to have it and the ideas started spinning on what I wanted to do with it.
I don’t always know immediately what my plan is…
sometimes they have to develop. But this box was going to be fabulous, I just knew it.
I love the wide slim drawers
and since this box is quite large I knew it would be good for storing things in. I don’t know what, but I’ll come up with something!
This box may have been quite fancy in its day…but at this point, it’s more of a wreck. Two of the drawers were already missing their lining so that made my job just a bit easier. Using needle-nose pliers and a metal scraper I removed as much of the lining as I possibly could.
I don’t know what kind of NASA certified glue
was originally used in this box but I was certainly not going to win this fight, so I sanded down what I couldn’t remove and that was that.
After all the scraping and sanding
I used my vacuum to really get all the dust out of it. I knew I would be lining the drawers so I wasn’t too worried about residual glue but I wanted it as smooth as possible.
I recently discovered a line of products that I love working with.
Amy Howard at Home has some fabulous paints and specialty items and I used them for this project. The first thing I did was applied a product called Cracked Patina to the outside of the box.
This amazing product
goes on clear and dries very shiny. But the beauty of it happens when you apply paint over the top of it!
After the Cracked Patina had dried
for an hour I applied one coat of Amy Howard at Home paint in the color Java. Almost immediately it started to crack and the original stain color could be seen underneath.
Because I wanted this box to look old
with layered coats of paint, I applied one more coat of Cracked Patina, on top of the Java and allowed it to dry for about an hour.
Now it’s time for the blue top coat…
this is when the fun really starts to happen. I used Amy Howard’s Mai Dragon for this coat and as it started to dry, the Cracked Patina did it’s job and I began to see the Java and the original stain underneath. To help this along I used my fingers and pressed on the paint in a few areas, this helps to pull the paint off and leave a very chippy effect.
I love the way these Amy Howard at Home
products work together to give this outdated jewelry box an updated, aged and patina’d look.
I decided to use the original hardware
so I spray painted it using Rust-Oleum Paint & Primer in Burnished Amber. It’s a nice dark brown that goes well with the paint colors on the box. I love this paint and use it often. This is the same brand I used on my chandelier makeover.
Remember all that sanding and scraping
at the beginning of this jewelry box makeover? Well, I decided since the outside of this box looks old and chippy that lining the drawers with old newspapers seemed appropriate!
I cut the paper and applied it with Mod Podge.
Once the paper was all glued down with the Mod Podge I then applied a coat on top of the paper to seal it.
I am so happy with how this jewelry box makeover turned out.
I still don’t know for sure what I’m going to store in it, but I’m just happy to have it proudly displayed in my living room. I absolutely love paint and the magical changes it can make.
If you haven’t tried
any of the Amy Howard products I would encourage you to do so, I know you’ll love them.
Happy Painting!
~Cindy~
….wife, mom, Mimi (aka grandma) and home décor enthusiast.
