Pirate Treasure Chest

How this project came about... My daughter's room is Tinkerbell/ Peter Pan and we are going to do my son's room in a few months to be Pirates/ Peter Pan. I am so excited to do it and have been looking at all sorts of ideas on Amazon.com and Pinterest. I told my husband that on my son's dresser I wanted to find an old antique looking bowl and put plastic gold coins in it. He mis-understood me and said, "Yeah, I'm sure we can find a little treasure chest somewhere." I turned and looked at our toy box, Yep, I'm doing it!

We got this box years ago from my in-laws. They had purchased cast iron skillets in this box and were getting ride of the box. I loved it and took it and have used as a toy box. I have always dreamed of a rustic, cabin feeling living room covered with moose and deer. So right after we go it I painted some things on the box to go with the living room.

Since there was no paint or anything on the box all I had to do was take the rope handles off and sanded the painting off. I was hoping to sand down the words on the front of it. It was wood burned on and did not sand down or off at all. We thought about getting a really dark stain that would match the words, but just went with what we had.

I have had this little 8 oz. can of wood stain for years! It just never seems to run out!

The stain ended up darkening the words, but by that point I didn't care! I let the stain set overnight. Then I used a ruler to measure what parts I wanted to paint. My husband talked about finding metal pieces to put on the edges, but then we decided to try our Rust-Oleum Hammered spray paint. I tested it on a scrap piece of wood and liked it.

It took about 3 to 4 light layers to get the look I wanted. I LOVE this paint! It isn't very expensive and changed the whole look of things! At our old house I took the handles off our bathroom cabinets and sprayed them with this. They went from looking cheap to looking amazing! Once I had all the edges painted and dried I took all the tape off and made my vinyl accents. At first I just had black screw heads, open in the middle. I put them all on, looked at it and didn't like it. You would see the gold hammered paint under the screw head vinyl and it looked dumb. I took them all off and cut the screw heads out of dark gray vinyl and made a black vinyl circle smaller then the screw head to go under. They look great! My FAVORITE part- the key hole! I made myself a template of an oval out of vinyl, taped up all around the oval and spray painted the oval. Once it was dry I added the vinyl black key hole part.

I LOVE how this turned out. Better yet, I had everything laying around my house so it cost me nothing to do this!