A Wilder Finish: Storage Cabinet from Crate and Barrel Goes to the Furniture Spa!

I absolutely adore the output of this project! I came upon this Crate and Barrel tall storage cabinet. Judging from the prices of the pieces that are currently in stock at Crate and Barrel, I suspect that my "project" was somewhere around $1,000 when originally purchased. After being in the furniture refinishing business, I am shocked that Crate and Barrel can charge this for manufactured furniture.

I have always been a fan of buying wood furniture (and cars) used on CL. I haven't seen a study of this, but I would venture to guess that any piece of wood furniture depreciates around 40% as soon as you take it home. Think about how many "like new" bed frames from Restoration Hardware you've seen on CL - people just don't get it and try to sell their RH bed frame for 10% lower than retail. Needless to say, it never sells.

Nevertheless, this Crate and Barrel cabinet was indeed a score since it has great lines and interesting detail - crown molding and a frame inset on the door - so CB cabinet shall be transformed into a Bex Wilder original beauty!

Here is the before and after! I love it!!!

How I did it

Transforming this cabinet to its final beauty took quite a while. First I sanded down the entire piece to generate a surface for the paint to stick on to. This was not difficult, as the original finish was not overly thick.

I painted the inside of the cabinet two coats of semi-gloss black, including the three shelves. The black cleaned up the interior and contrasts nicely with the white. After painting the interior, I put FOUR coats of white paint on the cabinet. I added floetrol to the final two coats, so as to minimize - this stuff really works - the visibility of paint brush strokes. Wow, four coats!

I decided that the drawer needed a little character, so I painted it with vertical stripes. Funny, while at the office - remember I'm an economist in the finance industry when I'm not refinishing furniture, i.e., a full time and wonderful career - I spent my morning meetings contemplating horizontal or vertical stripes. I decided to go with vertical because the cabinet is tall and relatively skinny - vertical stripes are complimentary of skinny :) My stripes are perfect. You don't have to settle for imperfect stripes because the paint bleeds through the tape - see this post on how to paint the perfect stripe!

Here's a photo of the pre-distressing cabinet after the painting and prep work.

I could have finished here, as the cabinet looks great! But that's not my style, so now for the fun part...distressing! I spent an hour or two distressing the piece by hand. There are so many lines and details that a hand sander would have been too aggressive of a sanding choice. I even distressed my perfect stripes! Then I stained the cabinet using Minwax provincial in order to age the look of the paint.

Wow! I absolutely LOVE how it turned out!