The Refrigerator

Once upon a time, my fabulous in-laws offered us their refrigerator.

Unfortunately, it was cream (I literally cannot find my before picture!). No big deal but next to white, I wasn’t thrilled. Russ was totally against it and convinced we should buy one. And then, our savings and money slowly started disappearing into this dream of my yellow house!

I was still convinced we could make this one work because I had seen and researched SOOOO many tutorials on how to paint it with chalkboard paint!

I wish I could offer an in depth tutorial but I really used this one from The Handmade Home to paint it. I used the same magnetic primer and chalkboard paint.

It was slow going. We started in Russ’ parents’ garage since it was already there and just kind of hung out there waiting for it to dry to apply various coats.

I think the biggest place I messed up was trying not to paint the ice maker part.

It was not beautiful.

In fact, it looked terrible and everyone that came in our kitchen stopped at the refrigerator and tried to make me feel better but mainly said, “Yeah, that’s a project that really didn’t work.”

But I had faith!

I continued to research and decided to adapt these ideas:

I saw this idea from Vignette Design adding the white panels. But, instead of adding entire white panels, we just used slim pieces of very thin wood from Lowe’s and painted them white. Russ cut them and we just glued and taped them on. Seriously, that was it! No one was more surprised than me that it worked!

Finally, we adapted this from Always in Wonder on how to add towel bars as handles! This was also easier because we had already taken our handles off to glue down the white panels.

In the end, I just used regular white paint (same as the hood) to paint the ice maker since it was causing a serious problem in the eye sore department and it worked fine! (Granted, our ice maker doesn’t work so we don’t use it for functionality purposes!)

Now, it actually looks pretty decent!

It flows better and doesn’t stand out nearly as much.