When in Doubt, PAINT

My husband and I each "inherited" hope chests. These are important heirlooms from centuries back. Well, my grandmother's is from Pennsylvania his mother's is from the seventies. The problem is, we have no space for such priceless artifacts.

Recently, because my youngest is now practically entering puberty (actually he's four), we thought we should update his room from a nursery to a boys room. The pale yellow duckies on his wall just weren't cutting it for my little superhero.

I thought I would try to utilize one of the hope chests and use make it as a toy box in his room. I thought I would strip it, putty it, sand it down and stain it. A Labor of Love. I learned a very valuable lesson about hope chests: Just because it's old does mean it is solid word, or even well-crafted. I spent countless hours with my heavy rubber gloves, covered in an ewey, gooey toxic mess getting high on fumes. When it came time to scrape off the gooey mess, one scrape and the entire front veneer came off. Underneath this 1/4" of solid wood was particle board. Some heirloom. So, I got out the Elmer's and had a field day. After all that, I still had to putty the heck out of the thing and sand off all the mucky stuff that dried on during my veneer catastrophe.

The simple solution (and what I ultimately ended up doing) would've been to simply paint the dang thing. When I finally gave in to the painting nymphs, it all ran smoothly. Two coats of paint, three on the top, just to be sure. I used the wall paint that I already had from my sons room. It turned out beautifully. It looks like it's brand new, and was built as a boys toy box. Simple, Simple, Simple.

You will find that a new coat of paint can spruce up just about anything. It's really not as scary as you might think. Lowes will match any color of anything you can lug down to them. They'll stir it up for you (even if you've had it for a while, just bring it down to them), they'll give you the little key opener, thingies, and they even have little pint size "Sample" paints that are the perfect size for small jobs.