Good Riddance, green monster!

I have been waiting, and waiting and waiting and waiting to do something with this:

Ahhh!!!! It's like a dirty green monster. With big white eyes and crooked teeth.

My original idea was to paint it, put some industrial wheels on the bottom, a towel bar on the side, repair the cabinet,  and add a butcher block as the top so I could use it in my kitchen (hmmm that sounds like it was a really good idea. next time!).  

Alas, I couldn't part with my current kitchen set-up.

Instead, I decided to make it into a "media console"-ish thing so I could get rid of the other piece of furniture in my family room that I didn't like. I had been using a really blah bookshelf to house the record player, records and stereo...

Anyway, here's what I did:

First, I painted the drawers.

And then the drawers sat.. painted, ready to go, right next to the big green cabinet that I kept putting off sanding. 

Then, Josh went on vacation and I found myself moderately bored and simultaneously motivated to finish up all of my projects.

So, off to Lowe's I went.

Again, I bought some trim (see last post). I came home, sanded and painted the "console" then got to staining my trim pieces..which I sawed and sanded in my family room (the joys of apartment living).

I stained them in my kitchen... on the white-with-gold-speckles counter tops.

..while I ate leftover brunch from Skillet Diner. yum! 

It's a good thing we eat a lot of pizza because I use the boxes for all of my projects.

I like to stain things very dark and rustic-y. I put a small trim piece on each side of the main opening. Oh yeah! I decided to do away with the doors. These small trim pieces were only put there to hide the damage that was done to the wood by those nasty doors. My brother says they look weird and that I should have run the trim up the entire side..

Then I stained two longer pieces, and fit them to the top and bottom edges of the opening. It was really simple, and definitely made this project a lot better than just a new paint job. Oh! I also bought that basket for our records.

As soon as the knobs I want from Anthropologie go on sale, I'll get those on as well..

What do you think?

I'm pretty proud of this one--but I'm not sure if that's due to getting rid of the old shelf, finally doing something with this one, adding trim to furniture for the first time, or simply being proud of the project itself. But for the time being, I love it!