A fresh coat of paint

My first apartment, when I moved to the city, my bedroom was technically not a bedroom. It was probably intended as a dining or living room and had double doors opening onto the main space. It was also very small and oddly shaped for a bedroom/studio combo. I made it work however thanks to the ever handy papa J who took the sliding doors off the extra wide closet and then build a giant desk to fit exactly into that space. When I moved to my next apartment and then this current space after that, the desk came with me. It was an excellent work surface, a big sturdy piece with massive amounts of storage. But it wasn't the most exciting thing visually. I toyed around with different ideas but finally came to the conclusion that if I painted it white it would (hopefully) look more intentional, as well as being a bit less obtrusive in the room. So I went from this:

To this.

Of course being the crazy and impulsive person that I am I decided to paint the desk in place in my room, and I also didn't feel that I had to empty it out entirely to paint it. So I piled the boxes that lived in the right side shelves off to the side, and then I opened the drawers to various depths and just covered the contents and painted around it all. I started at about 8am and was done with the third coat (including drying time inbetween) some time in the afternoon. After the first coat on the desk I looked around my room and decided that I might as well paint the filing cabinet too (It was black under the quick contact paper fix I attempted long ago to lighten it up. So I took off the contact paper and roughed the metal up a bit with sandpaper and slapped a coat of semigloss on that as well. The good news is this whole thing cost me zero dollars as I just used things I had on hand. The paint was the leftover gallon of semigloss white from painting all of the apartment trim, and even the new hardware was just things I had on hand updated (in this case the desk drawer pulls were old Ikea ones I updated with gold nail polish and the original filing cabinet pulls were spray painted with gold and then brightened with gold acrylic paint.

It was fairly tedious overall but well worth the day of crawling around on the floor and the paint I later had to wash out of my hair (not the first time that's happened) because this looks so much better. I am very much enjoying the more open and bright work space, and of course gold hardware makes me smile every day so that's always fun.

Now what can I slap a coat of white paint on next......