Spray Paint and Wrapping Paper Tray Update

This tray and I have history.  A long history.

You see, this tray was part of the, um, “decor” my husband brought into the marriage.  It was an oak finish with wrought iron hardware and I thought it was so dark and boring.

So way back before I started blogging I decided I was going to spray paint it antique white, you know…to lighten it up.  But it was still boring.

Then last year when this was a teeny tiny baby blog, I got all trendy and bold and painted it white with turquoise chevron stripes.  And it was cute.  But it still wasn’t really “me.” But I let it sit, and sit, and sit in need of another makeover.

So a couple of weeks ago I was working on our dining room turned sitting room/bar area and my husband and I realized we had reached the point in our budget where we needed to “shop the house” rather than spend $$$. (Anybody else at that point in their decorating budget? Anybody?)

We also realized that we needed to move our round coffee table from the living room into the sitting room to make it work.  This also meant we had to move our old leather ottoman back to the living room to serve as the coffee table.  (This made my husband very happy, he never really loved my decision to replace the leather ottoman with the pretty little coffee table!)

Well, you know what that led to-you can’t use an ottoman for a coffee table without the requisite tray so out of the depths of my made over laundry room came the chevron tray for a little update!

The first thing I did was take off the hardware that I somehow thought it was a good idea to just spray paint white.  Don’t do that, by the way…it doesn’t look so good!  I brought it back to it’s intended glory with a quick coat of Krylon ShortCuts in Gold Leaf-a must have spray paint in my opinion…I love it, it looks just as good if not better than Rub N’ Buff to me.

After the hardware was gilded I needed to cover that chevron which, while cute, was not going to work in my living room.  I just happened to have on hand some really nice, thick aqua houndstooth wrapping paper I picked up from TJ Maxx a while back and knew it was perfect.  This isn’t normal wrapping paper-it’s water-resistant and very high quality.  I loooove getting wrapping paper at TJ Maxx-it’s my must buy there!

I cut the wrapping paper to roughly the size of the tray bottom and attached it with Spray Adhesive, then used a craft knife to trim away the excess.

I love the modern look of the tray and I also love that I can change it again whenever my fickle self decides it needs yet another update! Isn’t that the fun part of DIY??

So what do you think? Do you like the houndstooth or the chevron look better? Do you ever cave and follow trends only to later realize that while it’s cute it’s just not your style?