Bright and Cheery Entertainment Center!

As promised, here is the before and after post about our entertainment center. :) It took us pretty much all day (on and off) last Saturday to get this done....but by the end of the day, we brought it inside.

First, here's a little background on this great piece of furniture. :) We ran across it one day last summer right before we got married. It was sitting in someone's front yard with a "Free" sign. Well, we needed an entertainment center, and we didn't have a lot of money to spare, so Free sounded good to us! So my father-in-law hauled it off for us, and it resided in our apartment for the past year. When we decided to move, we realized it was too tall for the space we wanted to put it (against the staircase), so we took the top off. Before we did that, it had some cupboards, and a spot for a TV to sit.

But we just needed the bottom half, so we pried off the top half....so it looked like this:
Obviously, because we ripped off the top, we had some holes where the nails had been....so we started by filling in those holes with wood filler:
And we knocked some of the nails that were still poking up a little bit down further with a hammer.
Then we got out our make-over supplies. We used paint brushes, foam brushes, latex gloves, and primer.
And our free quart of Glidden paint! Oh yeah!
Next we coated it in primer (except for the fronts of the doors, since we planned to mod-podge those)....
Then, after the wood filler had dried, we sanded it down so it was flat, and painted primer over it, too.

My free Glidden paint choice was called, "Red Delicious." When I saw it online, it seemed to be a nice bright red, but when we started painting, it looked hot pink! We were slightly concerned. :) It was probably due to the white primer underneath, because as we added coats, it turned more red.
After finishing all the coats of paint, we mod-podged patterned 12x12 inch scrapbook paper onto it. It was really time-consuming getting it cut to the perfect size to fit in the holes (especially since each hole was a little different...hmmm... :)) But eventually we got them all in:


Here's a look at the mod-podged paper up-close:

Then we hauled it inside:
And we left it to dry for a couple of days, then put the hardware (handles) back on:After a couple of days, we did a coat of Shellac over it to help keep it from getting dented and scratched as easily. Then, we put the TV back on, and VOILA!
All done! Tell me what you think! Also, link me to some of your furniture make-overs!

Happy Painting!