Trash to Treasure: Upcycled Metal Paper Organizer

I recently joined together with a group of other talented bloggers and we started a fun monthly DIY Challenge Group to inspire our readers in their own project endeavors. This month’s challenge was to repurpose/upcycle a garage sale or thrift store item. And here is what I came up with for June’s challenge…While at a friend’s garage sale, I spied this old metal paper organizer, which she threw in for free with some other stuff I purchased. Most people probably wouldn’t have given this thing a second glance, but I knew it had great potential!

I didn’t get many pictures of the makeover process, but all I really did was sand it down by hand, spray paint it with one coat of flat black and rough it up with sand paper.

For the text, I printed out what I wanted it to say using an army stencil font from Dafont.com.To transfer the lettering, I scribbled while chalk all over the back of the paper, placed it on the metal and traced over it with a pencil.Then I colored my letters/numbers in with a white DecoArt paint pen. When it was all dry, I lightly went over all of the text with sand paper to give it an aged appearance.To hang it on the wall, I just drilled some holes in the top part and screwed it right into the wall.I’m usually pretty terrible at keeping my work area clean and free of papers and notebooks, so I hung it right next to my workspace to hopefully help me keep my papers and stuff off of the desk.It looked kinda plain hanging on the wall all by its’ lonesome, so I added a few accessories that I had around the house.This old wooden window screen had been waiting for a home since I dug it out of a pile at an estate sale months ago.And I took the vintage soda crate off of our coffee table and added it below to hold books and a faux plant.If you missed any of my previous post about the office makeover, you can click on these links to read about the design plan, file cabinets, plank wall, wall color, and desk top.