{renovate} rustic garden cabinet

Happy Friday friends! Are any of you as ready for the weekend as I am? It's been quite the week! Today I'm going to share another before and after with you. This is for my *rustic* gardening cabinet. 

Late last spring, Chris came home with this cabinet. A friend of ours was throwing it away, so Chris, knowing oh so well how I love abandoned furniture, brought it home. It was a too rustic in all the wrong ways when it arrived.

But really it did have a lot of potential. It was filthy dirty, and structurally needed repair though. As you can see in the picture above, besides being gross dirty, it was missing trim pieces. We sat on it for months debating the extend we wanted to update it. Finally, one weekend I decided to paint it gray, just in the meantime. I was sick of the gross white paint. (Note: I am the most impatient person when it comes to *talking* about what I should be doing. I'd much rather just start a project already!) I even mixed my own gray out of paint I already had because I didn't want to spent money!

So I went to work with the gray. And when I finished painting the gray, I went with a complete whim and taped out and painted chevron. (Note to self: take pictures during projects, EVEN if you don't think it's going to work!) I didn't use a stencil. I didn't even measure it out. I just taped a simple chevron  pattern and painted. I really liked the result, but it was just too .... clean. I know, right? How does a piece go from too dirty to too clean? 

Do you guys read Design Sponge's Before and After basics? Barb Blair does an incredibly great column about furniture painting and finishing techniques. Around the time I was painting this, she had posted about wax finishing and I, loving the look, had bought a can of dark wax. So I used a sander to distress the entire piece and then went over it with dark wax.

The end result was LOVE.

As you can see, I really took a sander to it. It is way more distressed than I usually like my stuff, but it just fits so well with the character of the already old and imperfect cabinet.

I love how the wax muted the bright grays and really gave it the weathered, antiqued look I wanted.

At some point we still might upgrade the structure, but for now, I LOVE that I have rustic gardening cabinet. It holds all my tools and pots perfectly and it will coordinate really well in the finished back porch. If we ever get there, that is. :)

Have a great weekend!