Shoe Cupboard Makeover

It never ceases to amaze me how Karen from Sew Many Ways comes up with wonderful ideas every week for making and reusing everyday things that most of us have around the house. When you visit her blog even if you had no intention of doing anything that day you just can't help making something. That was the case for me last week when I thought I'd have a lazy day just looking around the net. That was until I came across Karen's most recent post of organizing ideas for rolls of paper. As soon as I saw it my brain started racing, yes it does happen occasionally.

I had an old shoe cupboard outside that hadn't been used for the last seven years except by our tamed feral kittens who used to love crawling into the bottom section to sleep and then couldn't get out.

Looks pretty grotty. I was starting to think I was wasting my time.

The bottom door was broken and would only half open.

You have no idea the amount of spiders I found living here.
 

The first thing to do was brush it all down to get rid of the dust and cobwebs. Next I got a rag and some bleach, unscrewed the handles and soaked them in bleach and water for a few hours. Then I started to wipe the whole cupboard down with bleach. When hubby saw me he told me to throw it away but thanks to inspiration from Karen and the genes that I inherited from my mum and dad, I knew I could make it into something useful again.

I unscrewed the doors and fixed the bottom one so it opened out fully. It cleaned up really well, much better than I thought it would but wanted it to look really fresh so a couple of days later went out and bought 3 meters of this stuff. Don't know what it's called. Washable paper one side and sticky on the other.

Once that was stuck onto the outside of the cupboard I put the handles back on and voila!!! a brand new file cabinet that fitted perfectly under then end of my cutting table.

Pretty good don't you think. I'm pleased to bits with it and even better is that I now my patterns and files are stored in here I have two clear shelves to fill up with fabric.
Next diy project will be to recover my cutting table.

~ Maria ~