I’ve been storing my random dried herbs and tinctures etc in various paper bags around the house because I didn’t have a proper place for them all.
When I saw these boxes at the local Dollarama for 3 bucks each I had a light bulb moment!
But it took 6 months of annoying the employees by phone and in person about their stock before I had enough of them to start the project (which incidentally gave me just enough time to receive chinese-order card cabinet pulls)
Theres a really awesome tutorial (and project) at debisdesigndiary.com on how to achieve a chippy weathered boat paint finish so I took some hints from her hilarious how-to and made up some chunky paint to ‘paint’ my boxes. I used playing cards to spread the paint. It took a few boxes to get the hang of the effect but I love how letting the paint thicken creates this awesome old finish effect where the paint edges are thick and defined like they were chipped off. You just can’t achieve that effect with normal quality paint. She says to use acrylic but I only had latex acrylic on hand and it did the job well-enough.
My strategy involved globbing the paint randomly on the surface and then dragging the face of the card across at just the right pressure to ALMOST but NOT COMPLETELY spread the paint.
Originally I really wanted a mashup of all kinds of layers of chippy color showing through but in the end I decided to go with a really muted green. I was SO tempted to Paint it White lol!
Another layer of even lighter green and then some scraping and sanding, followed by gluing all the boxes together and finally adding the hardware and:
Done!
It’s just resting on a shelf for now because I literally JUST finished it and havent decided where to put it yet.
Looks old right?
The cost of the boxes was about 40 bucks and the hardware totalled around 20 so it did end up being a costly project when you factor in time spent on it.
But I am so excited to be able to actually properly keep my dried citrus peels, mints, echinacea heads, rose hips, oils, salves, waxes and butters, tinctures and whatever other garden treasures need saving!! All I need now is labels 🤗
Happy New Year ♡ -Destiny
