Adventures in Decoupaging

Or this could alternately be titled "How a Mistake Led Me To Covering Everything With Maps". 

When building our desk for the office, I knew that I wanted one with storage.  Included in that storage had to be a filing cabinet (if it's not nearby, I don't file).  Otherwise we'd have paper piles on every horizontal surface of our house.  Because I'm a righty and I'm the one who does the filing, I wanted a filing cabinet to be on the right side of the desk (Bryan being a lefty would probably work better with it on the left side but he doesn't file so he didn't get a say in the matter).

We used unfinished cabinets for the left side of our desk, however we couldn't find a filing cabinet to match the profile of the drawer fronts (albeit, we didn't do a whole lot of searching) so we decided to make due with what we had for now and we could attempt to build one later.

Here's what we were working with:

Just a regular ole cheap laminate filing cabinet.  But we decided that if it was painted white we could make it  work for now.  So very carefully Bryan primed it, then sanded it (to remove brush strokes) then I painted it using a foam roller and even added Floetrol to the latex paint in an effort to not have brush marks showing.  All was going well until I had one little, itty bitty piece of debris that settled into the wet paint (we had the windows opened while painting so a breeze must have deposited it onto the drying paint).  I discovered this foreign matter after the paint had dried and just before I was about to do the third and final coat.  So I got out the fine grit sand paper and lightly went over the body of the cabinet both drawer fronts.  All went fine until I got to that teeny tiny bit of debris.  The sandpaper took hold of it and pulled up a nice, long strip of paint with it.  I went ahead and covered it up with another coat of paint but realized that unless we sanded it down and started over, it wasn't going to look good.

Do you see the gash in the upper right?  Grrr!

So I decided I needed to cover it with something and long story short, I decided to use maps.  I couldn't find our old atlas but found one at a used book store for three dollars.  I decided that I wanted to use the state of Florida for sentimental reasons (we used to live there, Bryan proposed to me there and our first apartment as husband and wife was there--plus I just love the ocean and beach and warm weather and salty air).  After playing around with composition, I came up with this:

 

But then things took a weird turn and I deviated from my plan and got scissor happy and it turned into this:

 

What was I thinking?! 

 

One hot mess!  Plus I had trouble keeping the paper from wrinkling.  So, I spent two hours scraping it all off and started over.

I used up all of my fun scrap paper so I decided to only use maps to cover the entire drawer fronts.  This time I used the state of Tennessee since well, we live here and are from here.

 

The pulls that we bought will break up all the pattern (I hope!).  I found the trick for keeping the air bubbles out was to thinly apply Mod Podge to the drawer fronts only (not to the back of the paper like a tutorial I followed advised), then position my paper and smooth it out.  I ended up using a ice scraper we had lying around for the smoothing out part and it totally worked (but a paint scraper or even credit card would work just as well).

And since I was on a roll with the decoupaging, I found these storage boxes on clearance at Michael's for $5 for all three.  They had exactly three in the yellow so I snatched them up.

Before:

And after:

 

I just love them!  Who knows what else I end up covering with these maps (a road atlas has tons!)?!  Have you tried decoupaging?  Were you surprised at how messy it is or was that just me?  I can only imagine how difficult wallpapering is now after trying my hand at this and my hat goes off to anybody that has wallpapered and lived to tell the tale!