DIY Patriotic Tray

A couple of summer’s ago, I sort of inherited four cabinet doors while refinishing a small kitchenette at my local church. After I had already cleaned, sanded, and re-stained the doors, we realized the cabinet boxes had too much water damage and a entirely new set of cabinets had to be purchased.

Most people would have thrown the doors out, but for a true DIYer, you hang on to them until you find a way to remake them. From one of them I made this DIY Patriotic Tray that I display during the summer months.

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I have posted about these cabinet doors before and some of the projects I have made with them. With the two smaller doors I made a couple of signs for my home just to try out a new project. The two larger doors were upcycled into custom trays.

It is a shame really that I painted over the beautiful dark stain of these doors because they came out so well last year. But I don’t have a cabinet to put these on so I can’t see just letting them sit around the craft room any longer.

For this project I used:

Cabinet Door
White Chalk Paint as base coat
Acrylic Paints in red, navy, white, black, and grey.
Craft Paint Brushes
Dark Creme Wax
Polycrylic in Semi-Gloss
Sandpaper
4″ Cabinet Handles from Lowes or Home Depot
Drill

The first thing I did was to apply two coats of white chalk paint to the cabinet as a base coat. Then I free-hand drew the lines for the flag pattern. Sorry for the hard to view image above. You can sort of see the details of the pencil lines. It was very hard to get a good quality picture of pencil lines on a white background.

The acrylic paints took several layers and half a day to apply. Since I wanted the lines between the colors to be a bit more rustic and blurred I didn’t have to worry about painting in pristine lines.

The easiest way to make the stars for the blue field, was to make them in Word on my computer and cut them out as a template to trace out the shape with a pencil.

Since I wanted the flag pattern to appear aged and rustic, I applied a layer of Dark Creme Wax over the entire piece to age the paint a bit. Using sandpaper across the top and around the edges helped give it even more of a rustic and old look.

I applied two coats of Polycrylic in Semi-Gloss over the entire surface.

Thankfully this cabinet door did not have hardware installed in their previous use, so I didn’t have to fill any old holes. I found some old style 4″ handles at Lowes and they easily installed on the sides of the tray by drilling two holes through the door.