For those of you who don't know, my hubby loves records. Until recently, this was his set up to listen to them...
Very functional, but not very attractive. This wasn't a problem until recently when our little Gray man started to get very mobile and into everything. What Brandon needed was a cabinet to hold all this and keep little hands from getting into his records and electronics.
A few months ago he went into a thrift store and found an awesome radio console from the 1940s, a Magnavox Belvedere. He kinda wanted it, but didn't buy it. A few days later he noticed it missing from the store and asked if they sold it. They did not, it was actually outside in the trash! They told him they would be glad to retrieve it and let him have it free of charge, and he gladly took it off their hands.
This console sat around in the house for quite a while. It was dirty and not quite so attractive. It needed shelves built in and some TLC.
It started to get closer to Brandon's birthday and I had no idea what I would to for him since I do not work and usually bum from him if I need something. With no money for a gift I had to figure something out! Then he started to obsess about this, and I knew getting onto this project would be the perfect gift. He asked my stepdad how to add shelves to the unit, and I measured everything out. We went to Lowe's and purchased some 1/2 plywood and had it cut to size. We also got some decorative aluminum sheet. We had all the paint we needed.
I built the shelves in (hubby is very good with music and spiritual matters, but not much of a handy man) and he sanded and primed the console.
Brandon knew he wanted something distressed. It took him a couple of days and he found the perfect image. He sent me a link to this image and said this is how he wanted the console to look when painted. It is a vintage distressed shutter by Anita Spero of Anita Spero Design. She does excellent distress painting (and has some lovely angel wings in her shop that I would LOVE to have). With an image in mind, I knew what to do.
This was perfect because we had a can of latex paint already in a very similar turquoise/aqua color. I painted the base color and thought I would just stop there until the next day, but I ended up getting very obsessed and stayed up all night painting this sucker.
Here's the base coat (it's the same color of the end table his record player was on before).
After the base coat dried, I added a few strokes of a golden yellow paint mix (yellow latex paint, golden acrylic paint, and Pledge Floor Finish). I just brushed it on and smeared it around with a cotton rag. Then I sanded several areas down to the wood. I noticed a lot of primer showing and the wood looked new, so I rubbed a paint mix over them (brown, black, and burnt umber acrylic paint mixed with Pledge Floor Finish). I just used a baby wipe to apply the mix. I dipped it in the mix and just rubbed it in until I like the look of it, and wiped the excess off with a cotton rag.
Detail of the distressing...
When I got the painting done, I added some cloverleaf decorative aluminum sheet, cut to size, where the speakers used to be.
We decided to prime everything with Pledge Floor Finish to avoid all the fumes from polyurethane. It's not like it will be noticeable if the paint gets a little chipped.
Here's the finished console.
And here it is in it's new habitat. Hubs is very happy with it, and it keeps little baby hands out of everything. Now we just need to get some matching knobs for it.
