A Doorbell Cover Make-Over. Yeah! Why Not?

Even the most mundane things should be pretty. Think about one thing in your house that you completely forget exists. Take a look at it. Do you like it? Could it be better? Why not make it so?

Our doorbell cover came with the house. It was sort of … prairie style? Mission style? I don’t know. All I know is, it didn’t go with our style. But c’mon I’m not  buying a new doorbell cover. So when I removed it in order to paint the wall it hung on, the time was right for a makeover.

Here’s the “before and after”:

First I filled the grooves with wood filler. A glumpy gloppy job. Yes, real high quality work here!

Then I sanded the gloppy stuff down, and painted the cover black.

The cover was originally really uneven so it’s still not a level surface, but that’s OK, I want it to look old and imperfect, like a relic we found in a souk somewhere exotic. This is to compensate for the fact that I haven’t yet been in an actual Middle Eastern or North African souk …

I next brushed on a few coats of matte Mod Podge, then sanded in one direction with coarse grit sandpaper. This made cool striations.

Then I stamped with various scrapbooking stamps and gold Tsukineko ink, with intentional uneven coverage of gold ink.

But wait. Something went a little too far with the uneven coverage! This cut-off of the stamp image bugged me even when hanging on the wall.

There’s a ridge on the surface there, and the stamp didn’t make contact. How to fix this? I used a trick shown on a video of how expert Indian block printers do their work. If you don’t want to stamp over previous work, cover it with paper. Simply genius! The newsletter from the local gardening center will do.

It’s much less lopsided feeling now.

Here it is on the wall. Much better! And it no longer clashes with the frame below it.

So if you giggle at the fact that any blogger would trumpet about the amazing makeover of a doorbell cover …. you never know, you may find yourself looking at a silly forgotten thing in your house, and making it special too!