A Bit of Bling

If you've got keen eyes, you may have spotted yet another thing lurking in the background of our office progress shots that I have neglected to mention so far.

He used to be this guy.

I found him on Ebay for $162 quite a long time ago, thinking we would use him for our bathroom vanity cabinet. Instead, we used our old buffet, which was a much better size for the space (see here), so this guy hung out in our dining room for quite a while.

In fact, you can see him here when I was organising all of our toiletries to fit into our newly Barbie-ed vanity cabinet.

I didn't really love him in that position, so an idea dawned on me that he might fit perfectly along the wall in my home office beneath my shelves (although at that time my shelves didn't exist). And he is the perfect size!

I decided to whip the sander out and sand off his timber varnish...

Leaving him looking a bit raw.

And then I gave him an undercoat. I think we had run out of plain untinted undercoat at the time, so I dragged out one we'd had tinted grey, and undercoated him with that.

And I painstakingly painted both the fronts and sides of all those little slats. Unfortunately, as you can see from the drips, it's kind of difficult to do perfectly.

And then I had to give him three full coats of plain white semi-gloss acrylic paint to cover over that grey enough!

You can't see it in any of the pictures, but the finish ended up a bit flat and non-glossy. I lived with him for a bit, but we decided that if he was going to take pride of place in my office he should at least make an attempt to compete with my flashy new dining-table-turned-desk.

So I bit the bullet and gave him a fourth (make that fifth if you count the undercoat) coat, this time in the same white high-gloss oil-based paint that I'd painted the desk with.

And then we impatiently left him to sit there for the full seven days that the tin recommends to get the paint to fully cure. Talk about delayed gratification!

It was worth it, though. The finish is lovely and smooth and a bit glossy.

I surfed Ebay and found a set of six little glass knobs like the ones we put on the bathroom vanity cabinet for $15.50 including postage, and he's finally done!

The little glass knobs do really pretty things with the early morning sunlight in the office!

I'm afraid I don't have a wide shot of him for you yet. This is due in part to the fact that I still haven't got my office properly organised so he's still covered in all sorts of still-to-be-filed junk, and in other part to the fact that the glass parts of those little knobs aren't attached very strongly to the chrome sections, so two of them didn't survive the first couple of strong tugs on the drawers. I need to get gluing!