Old Microwave Cabinet turned Laundry Room Storage

After moving into our new house that is well over twice the size of our old house, we quickly realized we had lots of empty space to fill and very little budget to fill those rooms. I've been going particularly crazy with our laundry room that has no cabinets, so I decided to try to revamp a very old microwave cabinet, that had been previously relegated to our garage because it was so old and tacky. We pulled off the shelf that was on top of the cabinet and filled in the holes with wood putty. (We did this awhile back so I don't have a before picture but it looked like this one. I can't imagine paying that much!) 

So I pulled off the handles, lightly sanded the rough parts and gave it a good scrub

I chose Rustoleum's Painter's Choice spray paint in spa blue because my husband isn't nearly as big of a fan as I am of bright colors. The laundry room seems like a great place of a pop of happy blue since I'm usually not super happy to be there.

I wanted to spend as little as possible, especially considering very few people are going to actually see this piece, so I used a hammered metal finish spray paint that I already had. The effect is very nice if you haven't used this paint before and you can only tell it isn't metal by touch. 

Since there were lots of imperfections in this cabinet due to lots of wear, I decided to do a distressed finish. Simply take a medium grain sandpaper and rub lightly around the edges and on the surface. If you want a more subtle distressed look you may want to use a fine grain. More pressure = more paint removed.

I love the look of distressed furniture pieces but I've never done one myself. It's a fabulous technique for a piece that's in a little rough shape like this was because it makes the flaws look purposeful. 

The knobs look more black in the pictures but have a mix of antiqued black metal with bronze undertones which makes the metal effect so realistic

I love the fact that I have some storage and organization to my laundry room and all it cost was a can of spray paint! I will definitely be looking more closely at garage sales this summer for other ways to upgrade outdated furniture to fill the rest of our rooms :)