Updated Shelves

I’m frugal by nature but due to circumstances don’t always exhibit the behavior. I’ve found that I have a finite amount of time and sometimes I’m better off buying something instead of repurposing it. However, when I worked on my laundry/storage room issue I had some perfectly good shelves that were an awful color. I bought them used from a co-worker so I only had a couple of dollars stuck into them. Over the course of re-organizing the room I did a lot of searching for organizational tools and found some really cool stuff, for really high prices. Since this is not a public room but a laundry/storage room in the basement I really didn’t need to have all that really cool stuff but I did want to neutralize the awful yellow paint and have it match the clothes racks that I had bought so the area had a cohesive feel to it.


Enter Krylon spray paint! My last foray with spray paint was when my 20 year old was in middle school and we had to make an atom. We tried spray painting Styrofoam balls with spray paint. Do you know what happens when you paint Styrofoam balls with spray paint? You get little melted balls of nothing. However I was game to try it again.

I went to the store and found some paint that matched the clothes racks and bought a couple of cans. Note to self, it always takes more than you think so save yourself some time and buy more right from the start! When I got home and started painting my husband took pity on me (he gets twitchy when he sees me with paint) and spray painted the shelves for me. Krylon is great because it adheres to plastic (which is what these shelves were) and has so many cool finishes. In my area the cost of a can runs from $3.47 for basic flat paint to over $7 for the decorator finishes.

I needed about 5 cans so my total expense of the product about $25 (I got a little bit of shimmer in my paint) but I could have done it for under $20. Since the shelving units that I was looking at to match my clothes racks were running about $40 - $50 I thought I did pretty good!

I wish I had a picture of the before to show you since the color was awful.  If you really want to see the color you can click the link above of the organization project itself, in the left corner of the before pictures are the shelves

What have you found to save you money when you want to redecorate or organize?