The area near our TV needed help. My brother, David, gave us a great media stand but because we don’t own enough electronics to fill it, it just served as a shelf to collect clutter. Here is what things looked like before:

Media Shelf

Do you see how we had picture frames, board games collecting dust, and the partially chewed box on DVDs collecting dust? We decided to take a shelf made of fiberboard and repurpose it as our media shelf. Since the shelf is much smaller we don’t have as much surface area to set things. Of course I forgot to take a before picture but here’s a shot of the shelf after a couple coats of primer.

Semi-before
(It had that awful fake wood look before we primed it.)

This painting project really taught me a thing or two about the strategy behind painting. Our most valuable lessons are as follows:

  1. Don’t do a bad job priming something because those drips of primer don’t just magically go away.
  2. Think about the surface areas before you start painting. If you will have to move the paintbrush over an area in order to reach something then don’t paint that passing ground first. I painted the surfaces that were parallel to the ground first, but if I had to do it over again, then I would start with the inside surfaces of the boards that stand vertically. My method ended up in a really gooey first coat, because as I painted the sides I would drip paint on the area that I had already painted, which forced me to go over it repeatedly.
  3. I would move the piece of furniture to a new part of the drop cloth before continuing to do the second coat. Both when we primed the shelf and when we painted it, we dripped little bits of paint that dried and formed a bond between the shelf and the drop cloth. When we eventually went to move it inside we damaged the paint on the edges.
  4. If you do have paint chips attached to the bottom because of the mistake mentioned above, use a razor blade to shave them off the wood. At first I tried pulling at them and it resulted in tearing some of the paint that was on the shelf.

Peter Using a Razor Blade to Remove Paint Chips

Oh, learning experiences!

Here is how it ended up. What do you think?

Painted Shelf

(Yes, we’re dorks and still own a Super Nintendo.)

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