Last summer my big home project was redoing the craft room + office, which I wanted to be full of bright and fun colors. We still needed it to be a functioning office, which meant we still needed a file cabinet. I had in my mind that I wanted a yellow file cabinet, and I had my eye on this particular one (which I still love!). However, I couldn't justify spending $300 on a file cabinet, and Caleb definitely was not on board with that. Instead we decided to try to paint the black file cabinet we already had. It looked very similar to this one:
To start, we removed the drawer pulls. Then I scuffed the entire file cabinet with Scotch Brite scouring pads, to roughen up the surface and help the spray paint to stick. This took quite a while, as there was a lot of surface area to cover. Once we felt like the cabinet had been roughened up enough, we wiped down all of the black dust the scouring had created. We made sure the file cabinet was super clean and dry before starting to paint. Caleb is the spray painter in our house (I always have so many drips!), so he then primed the file cabinet with spray paint primer. After a coat or two of that, he took to spray painting it with the yellow spray paint. It took several coats to cover up the black, but it was worth it! I'm so happy with the way it turned out, and for about $20 we now have a yellow file cabinet.
If you're looking for a colorful file cabinet, I would suggest trying to spray paint an old one first! It really was an easy DIY project, and you can find cheap file cabinets on Craigslist if you don't already have one. Let me know if you try it out!
(black file cabinet photo via)
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