@evelynandtheodore

Kitty Hiding Place & Midcentury Bookcase Upcycle

Here's another quick upcycle project for you guys. I wandered into Salvation Army with Leah looking for an end table that I could make into a kitty hiding place. This was one of those rare trips where I actually found what I was looking for (but of course I found more).

So here's what I got to become the kitty hiding place. It's a substantial table, and the doors on the front open. We have a rec room in the basement, where I have the most crap set up right now, but eventually it'll be a nice livable space in addition to our living room.

I'm still trying to figure out where to put all of our extra crap...
I just don't know what color to paint the kitty end table. I was thinking black, because of the entertainment center, and there's entirely too much brown in the rec room (the apartments were built in the 70's, so wood paneling is on the lower half of three walls, while the 4th is full paneling). Not quite sure yet.

But while I was at Salvation Army, scouring through their barren furniture section, I ran across a retro bookcase that I thought would be perfect for my bedroom. I apologize, I'm really awful about remembering to take legit before pictures, so almost everything has had something changed on it. Like here, you can see that I had started painting it with the same color as the Devine Buck dresser. It was the same color as the coffee table, the wood paneling, the couch, TV trays, and just about every other thing in our basement, but I knew that couldn't stay that way.

It looks like there had once been a sliding door on the front, as there is a notch that goes all the way around, and under the lip. Maybe one day I'll look into replacing that (who am I kidding, no I won't).

I mostly picked this guy up for his little details. The rectangles above the shelves, the little nubby legs, the depth of the shelves. And his price helped too: $12!

This one wasn't real wood for the most part, so I didn't bother sanding it (a big no-no, I know). I just made sure that I did three layers on the shelves and the top, and two everywhere else to make sure it was durable (I've recently bought some polyurethane, might start putting that on some of these projects to try to protect them).

About a day's worth of paint & wait to dry later, I had a nice sized bookcase to fit some of my favorite stuff! Here's the finished project!

One of the legs is kind of wobbly, but some wood glue will help that, and right now the carpet is holding it in place pretty well, so I'm not too concerned. You can see the corner of yet another project piece sneaking into the shot as well.... I have a wing-back chair in desperate need of an update. But watching videos and reading other blogs where people have done it on their own, quite frankly, I'm scared to mess it up. I have the fabric and everything, I just need to get the original fabric cuts off to use as templates, and just do it. But I'm a chicken, so it's still a faded red color... 

Any ideas for the kitty hiding place? If you feel that black is too plain, shoot some ideas my way, and I will be more than happy to mull them over! Leave any ideas/suggestions/questions in the comments below!
-Lex




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