Painted Basket Project

My husband works for a home builder and about once a year they sell things from their model homes.  Their employees get to bid on the items in a silent auction.  I was super excited to go as my husband has only been with the company for a year, so it was our first time.  We came home with a beautiful console table and a tan chair…and we got them both for $75 total!  What a steal!

We decided to move our entertainment center down to the basement and use this for our TV in the living room.  I wanted to hide the mess of cords by adding some decoration to the bottom of the console table.  While thinking about this I really needed to consider little hands grabbing at it and pulling it apart! 🙂

I was shopping at Home Goods one day every day and came across this really adorable basket.  I loved how it was painted at the bottom in silver!  I was so excited to bring it home and try it under my table.

Unfortunately it didn’t fit so I headed back to Home Goods to return it and find a smaller basket.  I don’t know how but I found two baskets on sale and I didn’t see anything wrong with them.  I knew this was meant to be so I snatched them up.  I bought the previous basket for $24.99 and these baskets were $7 and $8.  I also wanted a cute mirrored tray for my bathroom to put my face products on and I found one for $10!  So I totally scored all three of these items for the price of the first basket!

I decided that it didn’t look that hard to create the original basket so I decided to do my own painted basket project!  I got to work and spray painted the smaller basket.  It as very simple to do and didn’t take much time at all!  First I taped around the basket where I wanted the paint to end.  I also put a trash bag over top of the basket so that it wouldn’t get any paint anywhere else on it.

After that I went down into my basement to prime it.  It’s a little too cold here in Minnesota to be painting out in the garage so I spray paint items inside a large box in my laundry room/storage area.  I let it dry for about an hour and then I put on the first coat of silver.  I already had a can of silver spray paint from painting hardware on my front door so I decided to use that.

I applied a second coat of silver and I also applied a coat of Polyurethane Spray paint.  This may be my new favorite thing because I don’t love painting with Polyurethane.  I picked up a can of this at JoAnn Fabrics.

I was so excited for it to dry to see the end result.   I was a little nervous that the line wouldn’t be straight enough because the basket is “bumpy.”  I took the tape off after a couple hours of drying time and I loved how it turned out!  It’s such a simple and fun update to the basket.  It really adds character to my space!

So question….if you could buy a basket that was already spray painted or you could get a basket for 1/3 of the price and spray paint it yourself, what would you do?  Seems like a no brainer to me but I do love this kind of thing! 🙂  Now I’m trying to decide if I want to do something with the square basket or not?  What do you think?