Pot Cupboard Turned Pie Cupboard – Another Landfill Rescue!

A Miss Mustard Seed’s Milk Paint Makeover

This pot cupboard was sitting out front of an op shop for two weeks before I rescued it. The store had dropped the price, and I must admit, I felt sorry for it sitting there with no glass in its door and a latch that wasn’t working.

We removed the door and I had my helper, Celia, sand back the top to the raw timber and then sand the rest of the pot cupboard and door just enough to scuff the surface ready for painting.

Someone once asked me “What are your thoughts on different sanders and when to use them?” So I wrote a whole blog post on sanders HERE.

Miss Mustard Seed’s Milk Paint – Eulalie’s Sky

One of my favourite types of paint to use on older pieces like this one, is Milk Paint – a primitive type paint that is natural and comes in powdered form, and when mixed with water is a great, self leveling type of paint that is fantastic to use.

I have several tutorials on mixing milk paint here on my Youtube channel (scroll to Milk Paint tutorials playlist).

And to explain the difference between Chalk Paint, Milk Paint and Mineral Paint, I’ve written a full blog post HERE.

On this little pot cupboard, I’m using the beautiful aqua blue colour, Eulalie’s Sky. If you’re in Australia, you can purchase Milk Paint in my shop HERE.

The base was painted with 2 coats of the Eulalie’s Sky Milk Paint, and the inside of the pot cupboard, I used Fusion Mineral Paint colour, Lamp White (an off white with gray undertones).

Staining the top of the pot cupboard

Here’s how the top of the pot cupboard looked after sanding back to raw wood. Lovely rustic grain with some wear and character!

For the top, I wanted to use the All-in-one Stain & Finishing Oil (SFO) by Fusion Mineral Paint in the colour, Cappuccino.

TIP: At first, I wasn’t sure if I would like the full strength of the dark Cappuccino chocolate colour, so I tested out the stain on the back section of the top of the cupboard.

Happy with the stain colour, I went ahead and applied the stain to the entire top. For a great TUTORIAL on applying the SFO, check out this video where I used the colour, Ebony to stain this Farmhouse Table.

What to do with that door?

For the door, to fill in that blank space, this is where my thoughts leaned toward making it look like a pie safe (or similar to an antique meat safe), where they have the metal mesh for airflow. We had replaced all our screens in our house windows last year and used a strong pet mesh – you can ask our CAT why we needed to do this (rolls eyes)!

We had cut off huge lengths of excess pet mesh to fit our window size, and the width that was left over, was exactly the width of this little door, so I cut a piece to size and stapled it to the inside of the door frame to create this “pie cupboard” look.

And here’s the finished look. This gorgeous little cupboard sold before I had even finished it, to a lady who saw me working on it in my Facebook stories.