Shelfie (It's What A Shelf Would Take If It Owned a Camera Phone)

Look at me, all down with the kids using a play on the word 'selfie' in this post and 'twerking' a couple of posts back. I'm just so with it. Although I'm sure people who are actually 'with it' wouldn't say that they are, as it wouldn't be cool. So I'll just stick with being me then.

So, back to the point of this blog post. Do you remember when I bought this shelf-y/display unit thing, back in August 2013 at the Shepton Mallet Flea?

Of course you do! I know that you commit to memory everything that I write about on here. There will be a test later.

I bought it with the intention of painting it and putting it up in DC's room. But that was as far as the intention got.

Fast forward five months and I finally got round to buying some paint and cracking on with upgrading this yellow and brown 'beauty' into something slightly less painful on the eye and slightly more suitable for a small boy's room.

I chose Firecracker Red 3 by Dulux. It's from the range that you get mixed in store and I simply bought the tester pot size. I had originally gone into the shop thinking I'd just buy a couple of off-the shelf testers but the ones I was looking at came in 50ml sizes and I was pretty sure I'd need at least two, if not three since it seems almost impossible to get all of the paint out of a tester pot/tube. And they cost about £1.50 each, so that would have been £3-4.50, if not more. The joy of the Dulux mix tester pots is that they contain 250ml of paint in a lovely little metal tin all for the bargain price of £3.39 (or thereabouts.) So, that's five times as much paint as a regular tester pot, for a lot less than five times the price. And there are somewhere in the region of 1200 colours to choose from. (And I'm not being paid to say any of this!)

Let's get down to the nitty gritty. I gave the shelf an all over light sanding (out in the garage, to keep the dust at bay) to rough up the surface ready for the new paint, then I brought it into the kitchen (waaaay too cold to stay in the garage painting) ready to begin the transformation.

Here's the before shot of the back of the unit.

And here we are after one coat of paint.

While I waited for that coat to dry I wrapped my paintbrush in a cheapy sandwich bag (I buy the roll of 500 from Poundland as they are great for this sort of thing); you probably all know about doing this as it's a great time-saver. In the 11 days that it took me to paint the snug I didn't wash my brushes once, just wrapped them in plastic bags at the end of each painting session and they were good to go next time I needed them.

After two coats were dry on the back, I flipped this little beauty over and set to at the front.

It's got quite the Chinese pagoda look going on, don't you think?

Waiting for the second coat to dry.

Et voila. What a little (fire)cracker.

Much nicer than the yellow and poo-brown look it was sporting previously.

Now it's just a case of deciding exactly in DC's room to hang it. I'll let you know when I finally decide.