A few months ago, Michelle Black and I partnered up to do an image transfer on an old metal cabinet that I picked up at a yard sale. 

It was a small one with an awesome surfboard image. We loved the final outcome so much (plus it sold in less than a week), we decided we would do another one if I came across the right piece. (You can read more about this piece here).

Last April during my (not so epic) yard sale weekend in Morro Bay, I came across a much larger metal cabinet. It was the last day, I had a ton of room in the truck and I was feeling deflated about not finding anything amazing. I bargained the seller down to just $10 and piled it in with the rest of my goods and drove it south. 

After three months, we finally got to refinishing it.

We started with a simple paint treatment. The framework is painted in Aubusson Blue Chalk Paint® and the front is Old White so that the image transfer would show up. Michelle had a vintage sports image in mind so we stuck with more masculine colors.

Yep…that’s me and this is the only picture I have of the image before it was transferred.

Paper being peeled off.

And, the final product. 

I distressed the heck out of the edges and corners to get some of the original rust to peek through. My dad (who was very genuine about this) told me that he would have been happy to have sanded off all of the rust. WHAT!? I told him you can’t pay for rust like that and to keep his grubby sander away from its rusty perfection.

Just to get an idea of how much is involved in a project like this, the painting, distressing and waxing process that we do is the easy part. It only takes a couple of hours. The image transfer…well, Michelle was here for two hours just measuring, cutting and setting the image. It took her another four + (aggravating) hours to peel off the paper. 

This is certainly something I don’t love to do…but I LOVE that Michelle Black loves to do the image transfers and hates to paint. So, we make a rather lovely team. Who knows what we’ll do next.

You can read more about Michelle’s part of this project on her blog!