On the way to school one morning I saw this 4-drawer filing cabinet on the side of the road with the word “FREE” spelled out in duct tape

It was in pretty good shape, a few nicks and a little bit of rust at the bottom, but all-in-all, not a bad curbside find.   I didn’t really need an additional file storage in the house, but I can always use storage in the garage so I decided to make it over so it looked less like a piece of office furniture.

I removed the hardware from the front of the drawers and started with a nice blank slate:


I thought it would be fun to tackle a project that utilized Radiant Orchid, the Pantone Color of the Year, and so I immediately knew I would paint it purple.

To do that, I first sanded it down:

I used Krylon’s high gloss purple on the entire thing (it took a little more than one can to cover it):

At this point it was cute but since this was a garage project I thought it would be fun to work with textures (since even if it turned out awful, it wasn’t a big deal.)

I headed to the hardware store and wandered around looking for ideas on what would work.  In the electrical section I ran into these:
If you don’t know what that is, is the textured light diffuser panel that covers up fluorescent lights in drop ceilings and box fixtures.  To de-fract the light it made up of tiny repeating prismatic shapes.  I thought it would be pretty cool if I painted it.

The best part?  There were a few sheets on the shelves that were cracked and broken and so when I brought them to the store manager he let me have them FOR FREE since they weren’t able to sell then anyhow!  SCORE! (Once again, it never hurts to ask!)

I measured the size of the draw fronts and cut the panels apart with a tin snips (this was actually pretty hard to do since the plastic tended to splinter).  The key turned out to cut in super small ‘bites’ slowly following the pattern in the plastic.

I actually cut 6 squares, even though i only needed 6 since I wasn’t sure how well they would hold up after I tried to drill though them for the drawer hardware (drilling was actually much easier than cutting it turns out):

They looked pretty cool after they were painted.  I was psyched.

To line up the holes for the hardware I taped the panels to the front of the drawers and drilled from the back through the plastic:

Next, I attached the panels to the drawers using liquid nails (for projects):

I had a can of American Accents gold spray paint my neighbor recently gave me since they were moving. (I have never used this brand of paint before, nor have I tried the non-metallic gold finish and it was amazing stuff to work with. Great coverage, really good finish.. I was impressed with it.. especially since it was GOLD, which I usually can't stand.)

I used it on the drawer pulls and I loved the contrast:

I liked it so much I decided to also paint the front surface of the filing cabinet as well, so I taped it off and sprayed it too:

And that was all there was to it. I reinserted the drawers and I was finished:

The gold against the purple looked really cool. 
Here is what the completed piece looks like:

It looks neat from far away, but it looks AWESOME close up (which is not always true for furniture makeover projects):
Now this color combo is not anything I would actually use in my house, but in the right place it would be fantastic!  It will look pretty great in my garage!

The texture almost looks like snakeskin.

If you are curious what I have inside it.. Here are the insides of the drawers.







I love how well this came out and now I am really tempted to use the diffuser panels on other projects, but maybe with less wild colors.  I just need to find more free furniture on the side of the road!

So tell me what you think?  Would you use it in your house?

Linking up here, and at ThriftyDecorChick, HomeStoriesAtoZ and MyRepurposedLife