Garage Sale Rehab: Corkboard

I love this time of year because it means it’s garage sale season! Garage sales are a fantastic way to score some amazing deals at rock-bottom prices. They are a great place to find vintage pieces, fun knick knacks, and repurposeable items without spending the big bucks like you would at a big box store or even a thrift store. Added bonus: neighborhoods often do them as a collective group so there’s usually over a dozen or more houses to chose from and scope out!

Hubby and I went a-hunting last Saturday at his childhood home’s annual neighborhood-wide garage sale. Now let me tell you, this is a nice development with some pretty large and fancy abodes, which is PERFECT for garage saleing. Just think of it like Halloween – all of the nicer neighborhoods always give out the best candy, right? – well the same is true for garage sales – they usually have the best stuff! And they don’t usually price things as high because they don’t need the money as much as someone else might.

So Nate and I went out for a couple hours to see what we could find. We had been busy earlier in the day, so we didn’t make it out until a few hours from the end of the collective garage sale. Which can work in your favor – if you go later then people are more willing to slash prices just to get rid of items – but the negative of this that most of the cool stuff is probably already gone, which is why you should try to go earlier in the day if you can.

Anyway, we ended up some pretty neat stuff!

(excuse the crappy phone picture)

In addition to some sweet DVDs for $2 each (think Shawshank Redemption, Matrix, the Green Mile, etc.) we also scored the above items! A much needed wine rack for $2, a vintage chair for $5, and a shabby chic corkboard for $8. Score! I think they all have lots of potential, so I bought them with the idea to rehab each one of them to add some unique pieces to our home!

First one down: the corkboard! I love the unique shape of both the cork part of the board as well as the framing. Somebody obviously built this by hand! It was nice as is, but the majority of the walls in my house are white and I didn’t want it to get lost in this monochromatic home of mine.

Here’s where I started:

I chose a navy blue for the outside and a metallic gold for the inside – this is one of my fave color combos right now! The navy spray paint is great because it’s a primer and paint all in one and I found the gold spray paint leftover from the previous house owners in a cabinet in the garage (thanks previous owners!)

Taped off the corkboard part, making sure the lines were straight and crisp and then gave the cork a few light coatings of the gold spray paint.

It was during mid-spray that I realized that I should have done the outside first and then the cork because I would have to now try to spray the outside (including the edges that butt up against the cork) without spraying over what I had just done. Oops. Hindsight. My solution? Cover the corkboard with newspaper and tape around it!

Thanks Michaels, for the use of your ad to shield my handiwork! After I protected the cork I went ahead and gave the rest of it some layers of blue spray paint, waiting for them to dry between each coat. There is now a corkboard-shaped blue outline on my lawn (sorry, hubby) but that will fade and/or get cut in time.

And BOOM! Finished Corkboard:

This corkboard treasure came at the perfect time because as it is garage sale season, it is also wedding season, so we have a BUNCH of lovely save-the-dates to display. Our fridge is stainless steel, so the only way we could hang them was on the side of our fridge where they weren’t seen. Now we have the perfect place to display them! Check out what it looks like in our space:

Added a little bit of lilac from our yard and voilà! The perfect save-the-date board. It goes fantastically with my tea bar and matches my TARDIS teapot quite wonderfully, don’t you think?

What are some of your best garage sale finds?