Jul 9, 2014

Sara vs. Spraypaint

As soon as I saw Kimberly and Aubrey's "What Would You Do?" link-up prompt for today I knew that it was finally time to share my experience with spraypaint...

http://www.aubreyzaruba.com

Shortly after we got married J's grandparents downsized to a smaller apartment. They had a large, metal filing cabinet that they gave to us. It was not the prettiest looking filing cabinet, but we stuck it in the storage room of our apartment and used it to store all of our important paper work in it. When we moved in to our house we put it in the office and basically forgot about it.

Earlier this year my parents gave us some leftover laminate flooring they had. It was just enough to do the office. So we decided to give the office a bit of a make-over. We don't use the office very often (we rarely use our desktop, pretty much everything we do is on the laptop or the tablet) but it was a small room so we figured it was a good place to start our home make-over. I decided the ugly filing cabinet wouldn't fit in with the new look in the office so I decided to spray paint it.

Since it was March (and super cold!), and the room we were working in had no flooring and was being repainted I decided it was safe to do the spray painting inside.

Not my brightest moment.

We were about half-way through when I realized that my nose felt kind of funny so I went to the bathroom to check it out. It was then that I discovered a) I should have been wearing a mask because the inside of my nose was red like my filing cabinet and b) spray paint travels REALLY well and I now had pink carpet outside the office as well as pink tiles/sink/toilet in the bathroom. (Apparently opening the window and leaving the office door open was a good idea for air quality but not a good idea for keeping the paint contained.)

Yup, that really happened.

Three months later the carpet on the landing is still pink (less pink, but still very very noticable) but I have a beautiful red filing cabinet.

Lesson learned.



Have you ever had a DIY project go horribly wrong?
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6 comments:

  1. Oh no! Did you ever get the carpet clean again :( I try to lay down paper when I spray paint in my garage but I still have a white, silver, gold and aqua cement floor now :)

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    1. Oh and your cabinet turned out GORGEOUS!! I want to find an old one to paint now!

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  2. This is so NOT the spray-painting story I was thinking of...LOL!

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  3. I am a huge fan of spraypaint and have been known to go out and buy DIYs simply to spraypaint. I am so sorry about that carpet but I am LOVING that red filing cabinet! :)

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  4. i LOVE your filing cabinet! the poor floor. i usually spray paint on the garage floor because i don't really care about it until i had the brilliant idea to paint inside a box which obviously only works on small projects. thanks for linking up with us.

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  5. Hahaha oh no! I've had many giant DIY fails.When I was hugely pregnant I decided to finish painting my daughter's nursery while my husband was away at hockey. I had just finished and set the rest of the paint in the hallway when I tripped and knocked over the entire bucket of paint on our carpet. And the paint color? Moss green! My husband came home to me bawling my eyes out on the bottom of the stairs. It was quite the meltdown, haha!

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