Put some paint on it

I decided to take a huge step forward in my coming of age odyssey and purchase a filing cabinet. A place to store my many important documents. And to hoard an even greater number of unimportant things like user manuals for items I no longer own, cords that belong to who-knows-what (is this for charging the swiffer we owned in 2009? better save it!), etc. But I convinced myself that if I buy a filing cabinet, I will be motivated to sift through this mix of unimportant and extremely important and bring order to my life. So I made the plunge and ordered one from Staples.

Before tackling the hard part, I decided to focus on the fun part: making it pretty! Nothing like an ugly utilitarian filing cabinet to bring me down and make me dread the act of filing (ironically, I am all about filing and organizing in my professional life -- I just can't stay on top of it in my personal life).

"Please help me be less boring," it's whispering pleadingly.

I knew I wanted to put it under my desk, which is in one of our more colorful rooms (paint chip art, turquoise dresser, magazine rack, etc...) -- so even though there are some amazing and fun filing cabinet makeovers out there on the internet, I didn't want to do anything too dramatic that was going to look too busy in the space. Instead, I just slapped on a few coats of the robin's egg blue paint that I have leftover from the hallway project, and voila:

I told one of my friends I was planning on doing this, and she said: "you can paint a filing cabinet?" Yep, I've discovered that you can slather almost anything in paint. As you, faithful readers, may have noticed, it's one of my favorite DIY techniques -- though I'm sorry, it doesn't make for the most exciting blog entry.

Here it is under my desk:

I'm a fan. It's fun (for a filing cabinet) but also relatively subtle which is good given everything else going on in the room. Plus, it matches the Sweet William fabric on the chairs I upholstered, including one that I use as my desk chair. I might want to add a few details (like card holders), but for now I like the little upgrade!