Preview of the next project

The (for now) final storage project for my son's room involves yet another old shelf from the garage. This thing is a real piece of junk. It's made of MDF, has really ugly veneers and trim pieces and the previous owner started priming it and then abandoned the project.

I thought about priming and painting the whole thing but figured that would only marginally improve things. I could get a better color but I'd still have a lot of poor surfaces and think it would look like a slapped a coat of paint on a piece of junk. Instead I found some inspiration from a project over at Instructables.

I'll be cladding the sides and front of my unit in pallet wood, repainting the inside and adding a stained wood top. The first step was to run some pallet wood through the jointer and cut to length. In this case I'll probably be gluing the jointed edge to the shelf and allowing the uneven surfaces to create some texture (opposite of what I did with the smaller shelf unit). The next step is to clean up all these boards with the jointer or a sander and decide which ones get painted and which stained.