Another repaint

This was originally a drawer on wheels, the sort you have under a desk. Made of white melamine covered board and practical, but boring. Since then, it has served in various other purposes, such as housing a PC.

I went through some old photos and managed to find a picture in which you can see this as it was originally, under the desk beside the armchair. The picture was taken 25 years ago as me and my then boyfriend moved to a new place. The rest of the desk is long gone now.

At some point, I was experimenting with glue varnish and decided that the white melamine could do with some livening up. I went through all the comics I had, and as I had purchased all of the Sandman comics as trade paperbacks and only had some in a magazine format, I decided to sacrifice those magazines. It's my favorite comic, and I picked some of my favorite parts from those magazines for covering the outside, leaving the inside white at that point.

That's how it stayed for years, until I had some other painting to do and decided that the inside could do with some livening up as well. I got red paint for this, because red is bold and goes really well with the outside design.

There was only one drawer left at this point, and I decided to make some shelves instead. I used leftover pieces from a DVD shelf I had taken apart for making a dollhouse. The easiest way to attach two pieces of board together is using the kind of metal pieces you can see in the picture below. They will remain under the shelf, not visible, so it doesn't matter that they don't look nice.

After attaching the pieces together securely, there was a gap in the middle. Some filler and sanding fixed that problem. If you get the surface even enough, you can't even tell it's two pieces once the shelf has been painted. And who's looking at the surface anyway when the shelves are full of stuff?

The lowest shelf in the next picture looks flimsy. That's because it used to be a drawer and have a front, but didn't anymore. (The holes in the back wall are from the time the PC was inside this. All the cables went through there.)

I realized the lowest shelf wouldn't hold anything heavy, so I removed the remaining sides and used them to create supports underneath to make a proper shelf. I just glued the supports in place using PVA glue, because any stress to the shelf would come directly from above, so nothing would be pulling the shelf and supports apart.

When I had all the shelves I needed, I painted the inside all red. It took a few coats as paint doesn't stick to melamine very well, even after cleaning all the surfaces with turpentine. In that respect, covering the outside using varnish glue was a good idea. The only problem it has caused in all these years is that something once stuck to the top and tore a little piece of paper off. I covered the top with clear adhesive plastic to prevent that from happening again.