Luggage Rack Refresh

Happy Friday!! Today we’re sharing a project that has been on our furniture page for months with no “after” picture : ) Recognize this?

This little score was picked up for $5 at a local Salvation Army store this past summer. One hot Saturday I was getting antsy about refinishing it and used some gray spray paint to cover the chipped blue base.

Mistake.

The paint never dried fully, and began to chip away and bubble in the heat.

So, in the garage it has sat, waiting for a redo-of-a-redo, until now! After bringing the piece inside, we sanded down all of the wood and gave it a hefty coat of primer.

Tip: Since there will be bags and luggage thrown all over the piece, it’s smart to use a good bonding primer and finish the project (after painting) off with a few coats of water-based polycrytic.

After the primer dried we applied two coats of a leftover pot of color matched Behr paint from a different project, and then two coats of satin Polycrytic.

While that all dried we started on our top piece. We picked up a drop cloth from The Home Depot for around $10 and cut out our desired size, adding 2-3 inches on each side to account for seams and attaching it to the actual frame.

The drop cloth was perfect for this project because it is a thicker and sturdier piece of fabric that can take the wear and tear of heavy luggage. It’s basically the cardstock of fabrics.

It was also perfect because we wanted a solid piece of material that we could paint a herringbone pattern on. If you want to follow along with our method, we:

1. Put one long piece of tape down the middle of the fabric (the edge of the tape should be on the middle, not the center of the tape)
2. Place smaller pieces of tape at a diagonal down the side. We used the tape width as our stripe width to keep it simple
3. Seal the tape edges by pressing them down on a hard surface. We used a scrap piece of wood to slide along the edges.
4. Paint!
5. Once that dries, do the exact same on the opposite side, but paint the opposite spaces (so you don’t get a chevron pattern) and making sure the angles of your “stripes” match.

To finish off the piece, we used an iron on hem product to make a clean hem on the long sides (that’s where your extra 2-3 inches come’s in) and stapled the heck out of the short sides onto the frame with upholstery staples. We chose to leave the original material straps on for extra support for our fabric as well.

After that we were done!

Since we have no real storage for guests in the guest room, we thought this was a perfect small storage solution for making guests comfortable. Plus, it’s kind of like staying in a hotel room, which means vacation, which means frozen cocktails relaxation. And everyone loves that : )

What do you think? Don’t fresh flowers make everything look prettier? Does this make you want a vacation and bottle glass of wine? Good thing it’s almost 5pm : )

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Pss. We’ve submitted this as our “paint” submission to the #CWTS2014 link-up at East Coast Creative