Card Catalogue/Apothecary Cabinet, Whichever You Prefer

Today's post is a makeover of a makeover.  Originally this was a television.  In the early 80's my husband decided to make this into a cabinet.  In those days televisions had tubes, we found out the hard way that it was not safe to take the tubes out, it blew up right at him, luckily it didn't blow up into his face and he ended up with only minor cuts.

He put a shelf inside and added doors.  He carefully covered the doors with MacTac, remember that?  It matched the cabinet quite well.  Yeah, I know it was still ugly, but it was the 80's, things have changed a lot since then.

I don't know why I took this picture with it laying on the floor, but I guess you get the idea.

I peeled all the Mactac off the doors which took longer than I expected, and primed the small pieces that I cut out.

 I painted everything with two coats of red, then I sanded it all.

This is a mock up of what it will look like.  I know that this one is laying on the floor so that all the pieces stay on.

You would be surprised how many times I second guess whether or not I should antique the pieces that I work on.  The answer is always YES, you would think I would know that by now.  Below you can see the drawer fronts before and after antiquing.

Okay, so something surprising happened, I antiqued everything, and the next day when I started to varnish the cabinet, the stain started to rub off of the cabinet.  This has never happened to me before, and I'm not sure why it did this time.  So I had to decide whether to start over, or work with it.  Since it is supposed to be rough and old looking I decided to roll with it.

I sanded it between coats of varnish to smooth the finish out a little bit.

Attaching the drawer pulls was a real pain.  I should have had some sort of jig, but couldn't quite wrap my head around how to do it, plus I would have had to make two since I had to different sizes to work with.

As per usual I couldn't wait to share this piece with you, so I am not quite done.  My next post will show what I do with the inside. Until then, enjoy a few more pics.

 I have a few thoughts but haven't quite settled on anything yet.  In the end I absolutely LOVE this piece.  I wonder how many lives this old TV will have, it's on its third right now.