Schoolhouse Style

If you’re looking to bring that ‘schoolhouse industrial’ look to your home, look no further than your local high school. You might have to wait a few years until it gets really old and condemned, at which point someone will tear it town and build a new one in its place, but before that happens, if you’re lucky, you might get invited inside to help yourself to all the cool left-behind stuff before it gets bulldozed.

It’s not really a bulletproof plan, but that’s one way to do it.

As fate would have it, that’s exactly how it happened for Naomi and Sage, who got to spend four glorious hours pillaging the remains of an old high school. Don’t tell me I’m the only one who thinks that sounds glorious. I would do that every darn day of the week.

Here is one of their takeaways, a pair of upper cabinets from a science classroom.  Let’s see what they did with them …

 

Holy smokes, they are much bigger than they appeared!  Naomi put a set of tapered legs on hers to get it up off the floor a few inches and painted it a cheerful yellow. Now it has a useful job storing Naomi’s things and probably feels happy to look so cute and not be bulldozed.

 

Sage opted to stay with the natural wood-look on hers, but jazzed up the back with some fun fabric and mod podge.  She also taught me something I never knew about fabric and mod podge.  She says “the best way to [cut] a clean edge without any fraying is to first coat the back of the fabric with mod podge and let it dry. It really works like a charm and I highly recommend it.”

Makes sense, huh? It would also make the fabric stiffer and easier to work with. Maybe this is obvious to everyone else in the world, but it was a light bulb moment for me! Speaking of light bulbs, they also pillaged a few boxes of those too.  I’m so jealous!

See more of this dynamic duo at Plaster and Disaster.