Trash to Treasure Toy Shelf

A few weeks ago, people started putting large items out on the curb for the annual spring cleaning trash pick-up.  (Side-note: Do we as a society really have that much stuff that we need to do this every year?)  I found this shelf on a family walk, and I knew it would make awesome toy storage, so I carried it the half block or so home.  In a dress.  I'm sure I looked quite ridiculous. 

It also had a couple of brackets and some lovely orange and yellow puppy paw-print fabric on top, but I took those off in the hallway before bringing it into our apartment (along with giving it a good cleaning/disinfecting), so I don't have a picture.  Use your imagination...

I set to work painting in our kitchen, which is rather small, but provided an easier place to clean up if any of the paint dripped, since the rest of our place is carpeted.  So I got to contort myself into all sorts of positions to get into all those shelves. 

I used Valspar Caribbean Blue, a paint sample can that I had gotten in the mail, which came with a little tray and roller, so my total cost for this project was FREE.  Love that!

And then this:

So after letting the paint dry overnight, which was long enough according to the can, we started loading it up.  And the paint chipped like crazy.  So I decided since it was only chipping on the parts that had been white (mostly the shelves), I would just scrape those off and leave them white, and then repaint the top.  This is the first time I've painted furniture, so it was a learning experience.  I realized a few days later that it probably just needed to dry longer, since it was no longer chipping, but since I had already started scraping, I finished that anyways, and then repainted the top.  Based on that, we're going to let the top dry for a week or so before putting anything on it, just to make sure it won't chip.  But the rest we can use:

 

The boys helped me load up the shelves with all of their big trucks and Little People sets.  They don't fit perfectly, but they are close enough, and now they don't have to hog all the space in the toy box.  I really like how this shelf turned out, and I also like the possibilities it has for craft storage in the future when the kids no longer play with big trucks.