toy box makeover

My one goal (big-ish) goal for the weekend was to refinish the toy box I found for Drew on the side of the road. I found some amazing ideas but this is what I wanted to model mine after... an old wood look with casters on the bottom. I wanted it to look like it had been around forever... sort of the way the ship's wheel and the diaper holder look.

So I took the box, which originally was this disgusting brown with an unfinished wood top that didn't even fit and painted it white until I knew what I wanted to do with it. Since I decided what direction I wanted to move in I needed to sand the whole thing down. There was nothing fun about trying to do this.

Here is the unfinished wood top right before I stained it Antique Walnut.

This next photo shows you a little bit about why the sanding was a nightmare... the white paint wouldn't come off in the middle section and the odd purple paint really wouldn't come off either. But what made me forgo my original plan was when I realized that the center portion was really no greater than glorified cardboard (AJ's description) and it looked awful when I sanded it and tested out stain on it.

Because we had some paint in Sandpiper left over from the painting I did in the entryway we decided to use that instead of the original staining idea. I was really disappointed because it would come out looking similar to what it looked like when I started the project. I filled in the nail holes that you can see in the photo below with plaster and then sanded them.

Here is my little guy helping AJ secure the casters (industrial looking wheels) that we picked up at Home Depot for $3.99 each.

I hand wrote on the box "est. 12-28-10", Drew's birth date.

We popped Drew in the toy box for some photos. The first on is very true to life... Drew attacking one of our faces...

The finished product! It's hard to see the casters unless you look dead on but Drew loves when we stick him in the box and wheel him around.

We tried to get a good photo of the two of us but Drew was more interested in crawling around and banging on things.

There you have it... a toy box makeover. You may be seeing another makeover soon if I can find some boxes similar to my original vision...