DIY interiors project – colourful cupboards

_{Some items have been gifted}

Want to inject a bit of colour into your room but don’t want to commit to a complete wall-to-wall makeover? Can I suggest painting the inside of your cupboards instead? It’s interior design on a very ‘interior’ scale – the inner walls of your storage to be exact! It allows you to add splashes of fun colours without changing your entire room scheme and adds a sense of surprise to other rather dull storage solutions.

You can have a perfectly calm and serene neutral palette on all four walls, but when you open up those cupboard doors BAM! You’re hit with a fresh burst of zesty colour. It’s guaranteed to brighten up even the dullest morning (and wake you up!) if you open your workday wardrobe and sunshine yellow or bright sky blue is waiting for you. I’ve spotted examples of bright turquoise paint being used inside kitchen units on A Beautiful Mess blog and architect George Clarke used different citrus colours inside his children’s cupboards on Amazing Spaces.

Colours can define uses – each child having their own colour storage and taking responsibility for it, for example – and cupboard doors can be opened (or removed altogether!) to bring colour into the room and change the ambience of a space. Bright colours surely equal party time, do they not?! As you only need a small tin of paint for decorating cupboard spaces it’s a purse-friendly interior design project (keep an eye out for reduced tins in crazy shades!) and you can be adventurous with your colour choices. It’s definitely a design feature that I want to do lots of in my new home and I tried out the technique inside an old bedroom storage cupboard with a pop of pink…

This storage space was built into the room when the house was first constructed, and it still has the same doors and cobbled-together shelving from years of use. I started by removing the doors and taking out all the shelves, bracing wood, hooks and screws (some of those we pretty difficult to remove after 50 years, I can tell you!) and then proceeded to fill the resulting holes and sand it down to a smooth surface.

Being rather eager to get started, I didn’t clean the walls; I simply vacuumed up all the dust I’d made from sanding the filler, wiped down the skirting board and got started. I didn’t need to worry about the slightly dirty walls – the All-Surface Paint I was using was gifted by Rust-Oleum and it’s a paint-and-primer in one so it covered everything up without any problems. In fact, it’s good to use on wood, metal, plastic, ceramics, walls and more so no matter where I painted it, it stayed put and covered perfectly.

To do a very thorough job, I went back (after about 2 hours drying time) and gave the cupboard interior a second coat, but it didn’t really need much extra paint, as the first coat covered so well. I painted the insides of the cupboard doors with two coats of pink paint too. The colour I’ve used is “Rose Satin” which looked like a pastel milkshake pink in the tin, but dried to a dusky rose shade, as you’d imagine from the name. I’ve included some photos of the floral fabrics that inspired the colour choice below; this means that when the wardrobe doors are open the inside of the cupboard coordinates with the rest of the room rather than clashes. While the paint was drying I also added a fresh coat of white satin All Surface Paint on the outside of the doors and allowed this to dry thoroughly before fitting some new white rose handles.

After only a few hours work, the paint was dry and I could reattach the cupboard doors. We fitted an offcut of the new carpet into the bottom of the cupboard to cover up the old tiled floor and really finished off the space. As this cupboard is in the bedroom, it’s going to be used as a wardrobe so we screwed the old hanging rail into place (which might be replaced in the future) and added a small set of drawers in the bottom of the cupboard to make the most of the space. What do you think of this “interior” makeover? Would you paint the inside of your built-in storage, wardrobes or even kitchen cupboards with bright colours or coordinating hues? Have you already used this technique to add subtle colour to your home? Let me know by leaving me a comment below or tweet me @Cassiefairy.

This post was created in collaboration with Rust-Oluem and reflects my true experience of using the paint. 

Some items in this blog post have been gifted to me and the pink links indicate a gifted product, affiliate link or information source. All thoughts and opinions in this post are based on my own experience and I am not responsible for your experience 🙂