I am at it yet again with another furniture update. This furniture makeover is our shoe bench in our laundry room that was just redone as part of the Spring One Room Challenge. This original brown shoe bench came from Bed Bath and Beyond about 10 years ago. At our previous house when our son was a crawling baby he liked to go over to the shoes by the door and start chewing on them. This shoe bench was our solution to store the shoes so he couldn’t get to them. When we moved here to the farmhouse this bench was stored in our laundry room and it’s a nice bench to sit on when you’re putting your shoes on. But the dark brown just wasn’t going to fit in with the new aesthetic of the room. So I decided to do a shoe bench DIY makeover!
To start out I roughed up the surface of the bench. The bench is NOT solid wood and is made of particleboard and pressed wood. When choosing my paint I knew I wanted something was going to stick to this very slick surface so first I knew I needed to prime. Then I applied cabinet and trim paint from Behr because I already had this on hand.
I was glad that I used paint I already had but then once it was painted gray I realized it needed something else to fit into the room. The laundry room already has a lot of gray color and this just seemed so bland in the space. I felt that the bench needed something to set it apart.
This thought led me to add something to the front indentation on the shoe bench. I found this rounded wooden trim in my parent’s barn and decided I was going to keep it the raw wood and add some detail to the bench.
I measured and then cut all the trim and then sanded them all with my orbital sander and a fine grain sandpaper so that the dirt and grime would come off. The original plan was to put the trim tight against each other in each spot but there would be at gap at the bottom and I would have had to rip one of them in half. I didn’t like the look if one of one of them being cut so I decided to add a little space in between each one so that it looked like they were a tight fit.
I didn’t use anything to measure in between the trim pieces and just eyeballed it as I do most of the time. In order to allow the glue to dry and not have the trim fall off I tipped the bench on its back so that gravity could do that job for me.
Interior wood glue was used and each trim piece was arranged and then I waited over 24 hours for it to dry.
Now this bench looks great in this space and is no longer the outdated brown. And soon I will need to make a cushion for the seat because the one I had ordered didn’t look right on the seat. So I’m going to make my own and of course I will share the tutorial when the time comes.
