Simply Beautiful By Angela

creating simple beauty on a budget

Thrift Store Step Stool Makeover

Hello everyone and welcome to this month’s Thrift Store Challenge!  On the 4th Thursday of each month I team up with my amazing blogging friends to share a thrifted item that we’ve upcycled.  

This challenge kind of snuck up on me this month since we’ve been so busy preparing for our big move, but I still came through and can’t wait to show you what I created!

The Rules:

  • Upcycle an item(s) from a thrift store, resale store, or garage sale into a new piece of decor.
  • There’s no monthly theme.
  • There’s no budget to stick to.

Meet the Hosts

Angela | Simply Beautiful by Angela
Victoria | Dazzle While Frazzled – Yami | The Latina Next Door
Kathleen | Our Hopeful Home – Jennifer | Cookies Coffee and Crafts
Deborah | Salvage Sister & Mister – Jeanie | Create and Babble
Gail | Purple Hues and Me – Michelle | Our Crafty Mom
Denise | My Thrifty House – Sue | A Purdy Little House
Marie | The Inspiration Vault – Michelle | Michelle James Design
Debra | Shoppe No. 5

Make sure you follow our board on Pinterest for more upcycled decor inspiration!

This past Saturday was 50% off day at Goodwill so I popped in real quick to see what could find to flip.
I  actually saw a lot of super cool large furniture pieces that I could totally picture in the new house. But I knew Anthony would be less than thrilled with having more large furniture to move, so I decided to go small and ended up walking away with this cute little wooden step stool.

I’m constantly finding myself stealing the stool that we keep in the boys’ bathroom in order to reach the top shelves in our closet so the second that I spotted it I knew that it would be perfect to keep inside our closet.

It just needed to be dressed up a little bit!

Supplies Used: (Affiliate links may be provided for convenience.  For more info, see my full disclosure here.) 

The first thing that I did was use a little bit of joint compound to fill the small staple holes that it had on the top and sides.  Of course wood filler would be ideal, but I couldn’t find it in our tornado of a garage so this worked just as well!

Once it was dry and sanded I stained it with minwax special walnut which is a nice medium brown stain.
I then used a chip brush to begin dry brushing some white paint over the stain to make it look nice and weathered.

Dry brushing is so easy that even my 4 year old likes to jump in and help out!  And what a fine little dry brusher he is!

It was looking pretty cool but I felt like it was a little too plain and it just needed…something…
After a little bit of brainstorming I decided to create a logo on the top.  I painted the rim of the underside of a paint can with a little bit of white paint and then pressed it on to the top of the stool.
I went back over it with some sandpaper to make it look a little more worn.
I struggled with what to write in the middle.  Finally I decided that it would be cute to do something that involved our anniversary date.
I busted out my handy stencil set and began writing “est.” by positioning the “s” in the center and holding it down with Frogtape before dabbing on some white paint with my small paintbrush.
I found that briefly using a hair dryer worked perfectly to dry the letter quickly so that I could put my  next letter down right away.
I realized about half way through writing the date out that I was going to be off centered.  Whoops! I ended up adding the dash in front and now it kind of looks like it was always meant to be there.  Happy mistakes!

I sanded the letters down just slightly and then gave it two coats of polycrylic to protect it.

This is how it turned out!

It’s looks like it’s been around for awhile and it’s hard to believe that it was just a plain pine colored stool before.

Since I had all of my supplies on hand the only cost for this project was the price of the stool which I scored for just 2 bucks!

And now for more thrifty goodness!

Check out what my fellow upcyclers created below!

Linking up to these awesome parties!

Comments

  4. This is super cute. I would have snatched that up at the Goodwill too. Nice find. I love that your little boy like to dry brush. He is probably better at it than I am. LOL! It turned out really nice!

  6. Ha! That paint lid trick is so simple is it genius! Love how the step stool turned out and you make dry brushing look easy. Yes, I know it is, but i have a tendency to mess up stuff like that – unique talent, I guess. lol

    Julie

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