My own union jack themed cupboard :D

Finally! I've been lusting at every furniture I've seen with the Union Jack painted on it :D This is one of my favourite pieces I saw on Design Sponge :

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I knew I just had to have one in my own abode! I saw one 3 drawer chest with the union jack on it selling in SSF for about RM700ish - and thats after the discount. With very little money to toss around, I decided I'd make my own :D  And here's how it turned out !!

Not bad huh : >

Read more to see my work in progress!




So here's how it was before. Grey, too office-like and boring :< Clearly it wasn't going to fit in my house if it stays looking that way.

 

First I took everything out, stuffed them into a container and disassembled the whole thing. I labeled every part so I'd know where to place the design. 

After I penciled the outlines of the union jack, I masked the edges and proceeded to paint. This was my first in a long long time dealing with solvent-based paint. The first time was at life skills class (Kemahiran Hidup) where we had woodworking, but I completely forgot the experience(that was nearly 10 years ago). Anyway, the point is, I HATE SOLVENT BASED PAINT. It smells, its hard to clean, its so.. intoxicating. Urgh. After I was done with the whole thing, I read the news, and turns out Nippon recently came up with gloss paint for water based wood and metal. I'm definitely going for that the next time round! : D

 

Getting ready to paint. I know I've mentioned how I dislike painting at night because of the bugs, but sometimes its just plain inevitable :/

After painting a few layers. Turns out the paint wrinkles when its been put on too thick or if the surface dried way too fast before the paint before it could. I learnt a lot of grave lessons from this:

1. Don't put your paint on too thick paint them all extremely thinnnn layers.
2. If you're a stubborn idiot like me and you still want to put your paint on thick, make it think enough so you wont need to put on a second layer (which will cause the wrinkling).
3. Aerosol paint DOES NOT GO with solvent paint. Unless it went on really thinly. Which would be hard to control. I messed up BIG TIME. I was almost done, and thought I could use a nice finish by using up the rest of my leftover clear gloss spray.  Oh. What a nightmare. I watched the layer of paint behave like skin swelling, puckering and bursting. Like a disgusting eruption of acne, pimples and boils in x10000 speed. Thinking about it still gives me the goosebumps.  I wanted to cry -_- Because it meant scraping everything off, and starting from scratch. Good thing I only tried it out on one of the doors :/

The neighbourhood cat that stared at me the whole night.

Then came the red paint.

 For the top, I bought pvc leather in gold from Kamdar, glued the top with modpodge and then nailed it to  the sides so it was nice and tight! 

 Lined the edges with a gold marker pen, to hide the imperfections because my masking tape didn't give me perfectly straight lines :(

Cookie my dog staring at me as I worked

TADAHHHHHHHHH. 

If you can see, I also glued metal studs to the side. Which didn't turn out so well, 

thus the lack of close up shots on that area.

No this is not the final outcome :P Just a photoshop of the design onto a photograph to visualize my plans better.

And one more time :D

Not bad eh : D