Apothecary Style Jewelry Cabinet

What do I do when we go to softball tournaments? Thrifting! I found this old jewelry cabinet when we were on a softball trip in Phoenix at a thrift store for $16 and some change. I couldn’t pass it up! I needed to give it a makeover!

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I decided it was going to paint it since it was completely made of particleboard. The bottom part was falling off so I started by reattaching that. It was super easy because it was just missing some screws. Excuse my next few screen shot photos of my videos…I hadn’t planned on blogging about this one, but I’m in love with how it turned out and wanted to share the glaze that I used and how faux wood particle board CAN look like pretty wood.

Yep, lots of you guessed it on IG…I changed my mind and ended up sanding the whole thing down. My initial reason for sanding it down was because I test sanded a drawer to see what it would look like under the orange and then I didn’t want the rest of the cabinet to look different if I painted it and wanted any of the wood to show through. So, my reason for sanding it was so that I could stain it and then paint over it and then sand little parts or chip away at little parts to make it look old.

After I had sanded it, I realized that the faux wood that was used on top of the particleboard would look like solid wood if I stained it. 

I decided to use this aged glaze instead of stain. It’s way less stinky and it gives a beautiful color! On this particular piece, the wood was not very absorbent so it possibly turned out a lot lighter than it would on other pieces. Normally when I use a glaze, I like to whitewash the piece first because it tones down the color, but this one, I decided to use the glaze without the white wash. When I got done using the antiquing glaze, it looked so amazing that I couldn’t paint it. You can find the glaze here, but I’ve also found it at Lowes.

There were many pieces of hardware missing as you can see in the photo below. The hardware on this piece was actually screwed in from the front side and the fittings were embedded into the holes where each piece of hardware was to attach. That made it very difficult to change the hardware, since the fittings were already inside the holes. I actually went to the hardware and bought new pieces that I thought would work with different pieces of hardware for the missing spots, but the fittings were different sizes.

I used rub n buff on all of the hardware that I had and then found some others in my spare hardware to use for the other spots that were missing pieces. I love having a different hardware on the bottom drawers.

I also had some of these label holders left over from another project and decided to use them down the center. I covered them with the rub n buff too.

I used all of the hardware that I had on the upper drawers as far as it would take me down the cabinet. One of the holes on the top drawer, the hardware piece had snapped off on the inside and was stuck inside the hole. I didn’t even realize this until I got it home. It wouldn’t have made a difference, I still would’ve bought it. In the past, with smaller furniture pieces such as this, I have used gorilla superglue on lighter weight hardware when I needed to because of issues with the existing holes. I used all of the hardware that would screw into the existing holes and then superglued a couple in place. The hardware on the bottom two drawers is superglued due to the fittings being different. It worked great! Improvising, it’s what I needed to do with this cabinet.

The drawer insides are a green velvety like material that is glued on with some sort of cardboard like piece underneath. I swept it out and it now looks like new.

I left the hardware off of the side doors because I wanted a more clean line look and I didn’t love the hardware being there when I tried it initially.

I am in loooooove with this little cabinet! I’m so happy that I chose not to paint it!

The rub n buff color really made it shine! I love the shiny gold look against this wood color!

Now to add names to all of the labels. I used the paper that I had antiqued in the past for the labels. The label holders gave it so much more character, in my opinion. I used my handy-dandy eyeballing to attach the label holders and I think it worked great!

I didn’t add rub n buff to the inside hooks. I think they look great as is, and they don’t need to match perfectly since they are on the inside. The other side has this same set up too, with all of the hooks.

I love how it has a mirror in the top compartment too. I didn’t sand around the mirror because I didn’t want to take it out first or scratch it. It doesn’t show from the outside anyways.

This was a fairly quick project, when compared to my last project. I didn’t sand it down 80 times, haha. I’m thankful for that, and I love how it turned out!