I once wrote a blog post explaining that the collective noun for grouping of chairs should be ‘jumble’.
A jumble of chairs.
You know, sort of like a murder of crows, a school of fish, or a flamboyance of flamingos (yep, that’s a real one).
And FYI, re-doing all of those chairs was a lot of work, you can read about that here.
Well, today I have a new collective noun for you. A ‘windfall of boxes’.
Yep, that’s a large grouping of metal boxes.
All of them were gifted to me by my friend Kathy. She is also a reader of my blog, and she had been stockpiling metal boxes for a few years now thinking that one day she’d paint them up like I do. But ultimately, as she explained, ‘just buying a metal box doesn’t make you quandie’.
Well, I don’t know about that. I think she could have created some masterpieces herself. But she needed the storage space in the garage and decided she’d just accept that she was probably never going to get around to painting these.
So the other day when we met for lunch she said she had a surprise for me. Her car was completely loaded up with these boxes.
She didn’t want any money for them, but there was a small price I had to pay. She asked me to makeover a particular box for her.
She chose a small, and very simple, little lockbox for herself. I think she may simply have chosen it because it still had its key, I’m not sure. Hmmm, I wonder what she’s planning to lock up in there!
She certainly had some other really cool options to choose from, like these two fab boxes.
These are the two largest boxes and I rather love the original patina on both of them. Especially the one on the left. I may not paint either one of these, but instead just clean them up and give them a protective coat of sealer to help make them functional for storage.
There were several metal recipe boxes in the stash.
I’ll tuck those away to paint later, except for the shredded wheat box.
I won’t paint over that. Instead I just used a magic eraser to clean it up.
A few of the boxes fall under the heading of ‘office supplies’.
Two are typical lockboxes (that have lost their keys), and the one with the green interior is a file box.
I fell in love with that pop of green as soon as I opened that one up. I definitely won’t be painting over that green.
I also thought this bookshelf style box was pretty cool.
That’s going to be a fun makeover.
There is one box in the mix that isn’t metal.
I wasn’t initially sure I wanted to tackle this one, but then I remembered the record box that I painted up a couple of years ago and thought I could do something similar with this one. I love that Bakelite handle.
Finally, out of this entire pile, there are only two actual toolboxes. Well, wait, I take that back. One is an actual toolbox, the other is really a tacklebox.
And can I just say, I wish people wouldn’t write on these things with permanent marker.
If it weren’t for that, I’d be tempted to just clean this one up and add some transfers because I kind of love that shade of avocado green. But ‘camping’ has to go, so I’ll have to figure something out for that.
But speaking of avocado green, that brings me back to Kathy’s lockbox. It had a rather slick, shiny finish so after cleaning it, I gave it a coat of Dixie Belle’s Bonding Boss to improve the adhesion of my paint.
Kathy gave me carte blanche to do whatever I wanted with it, so I started with Dixie Belle’s Guacamole on the inside.
I added the tea rose transfer from I.O.D.’s Lover of Flowers.
After giving the outside two coats of DB’s Drop Cloth, and then sanding the edges to distress it a bit, I dressed it up with more of the Lover of Flowers transfers.
I also added a little bee that came from the re.design with prima knob transfers to the handle.
I finished everything off with a coat of Dixie Belle’s clear wax.
I’m pretty sure that Kathy is a lover of flowers, so I hope she’ll love how this box turned out. How about you? And which of the boxes from my windfall would be your favorite? Leave a comment and let me know.