The majority of the furnishings in my home have been painted at one time or another.  Every once and a while, I choose to leave something as is, shocking, I know.  Such is the case with my little green cart.

My husband found this little gem for me 2 years ago.  He’s the best……I had originally planned to just use it as a work table.

Or maybe just clean it up, repaint it, and sell it.

It had seen better days.

I am still trying to wrap up the family room and have been working on storage for the toys and all the little things that go hand in hand with family life.  We have windows on 3 walls, which is great for letting light in, and one of the windows is next to my attic door.

Whatever I put under this window has to be moveable, so I can get to my attic whenever I need to.  This little cart was the perfect fit and the color complimented the blue lockers on the other side.  But it didn’t come with wheels, so I will show you how I added them.

But first, Paint!! Just Kidding, I decided to keep it original, but with it being so rusty and the kids having access to it, I figured clear coating it was the best option.  I scrubbed it with cleanser, then used a fine grit sanding block to smooth and remove any loose pieces of paint and rust.  I used clear gloss spray as the clear coat.

I had second thoughts after applying the first coat.  It didn’t cover very consistently.  You can see the unevenness here.  I gave it another light sanding and another coat of spray, which did help, but I recommend that if you are doing a larger piece of furniture, brush on your clear coat instead.  You should get more even finish.

I purchased these little casters at Lowes.  They have a bunch to choose from, and I picked ones that were smaller in size and wouldn’t leave marks on my floors.

As you can see here, the legs of my cart were bigger than the screws that hold the casters.  Also, there is nothing to screw into, because the legs are hollow.  This is when I tapped into my inner “Macgyver.”

I found this black hose in my husband’s pile of left over materials, if you don’t have a spare piece of hose lying around, a bunch of duck-tape would be a nice substitute, because duck-tape fixes everything right?

The hose was the perfect fit to my cart.

And the perfect fit to my casters.  Just think of the hose as an adapter of sorts.  You could also wrap the screw with enough tape so it would be thick enough to stay in the leg of the cart.

Once I was confident that my plan would work, I used my kitchen scissors to cut a piece of hose for each caster.

The whole process took about 5 minutes.

Perfect fit!

And you can’t even see the hose from behind.  I do recommend using a piece of dark hose or dark tape, that way you won’t see it.

Adding wheels to this little cart has made it so much more useful.

The second application of top coat turned out very well.  I love how the rust gave it a nice texture, don’t you want to touch it?

So far we are storing my daughters art kits on the bottom shelf, and I would like to store the children’s electronics on it also, but I haven’t quite figured out how to make it look nice and deal with all of the wires that come along with them.  I will let you know when I figure it out.

I found a spot for one of my many globes, and the stump is something my husband brought home from work a while ago.

I am so glad I didn’t paint this little cart, it has become one of my favorite things in the family room.

I have been slowly adding things to the rest of the shelves.  These encyclopedias were found during my Tour de Junk 2016.

I found these baskets at goodwill, now they hold Thomas the Train.

I am always trying to mix old and new, some of these books were my grandmother’s.

Who knew marbles could look so pretty in an ashtray?

I couldn’t be more pleased with how the family room is coming together.  I still have chairs to finish for the kid’s homework table and more toys to bring up, and I am anxious to finish so I can move on to my office.  Shawn has built some shelves for me and I have an old fireplace mantle I would like to install, but that is for another post!