Vintage Steamer Trunk Makeover | $100 Room Challenge Week 3

It is week 3 of the $100 Room Challenge, and I have such a fun vintage steamer trunk makeover to share, this trunk has been mine for over 30 years!

Hey friends!  I am so excited about sharing this vintage steamer trunk makeover with you guys today.  If you know me at all, you know that I am addicted to the power of paint!  I love the way that paint has the power to completely transform so many things, from walls, to furniture, to floors, and the list could go on.  I can’t tell you how psyched I am that soon we will have an official guest room that is actually fit to host guests.  I have owned this little trunk since I was a senior in high school, and it has been used for storage and hidden away in our attic for years.  But since we moved it has been sitting in our guest room, and I decided to give it a complete transformation and use it as a storage bench at the foot of the the bed.

You might want to start here with Week One and Week Two of this Challenge.

What’s The $100 Room Challenge?

Let me start by thanking Erin over at Lemons, Lavender, and Laundry for being our lovely host, and this whole challenge was her brain child. If you are new to the $100 Room Challenge you can read more about it here.  But the basic premise for the challenge is this: you get one month, and $100, to completely makeover one space in your home. I know what you may be thinking… $100 is not a lot of money.  Just wait. What you can do with $100 (and a little creativity) will absolutely blow your mind.  And if you don’t believe me, just follow along, and click through and see what the other participants are doing for this challenge, and you will see so many great things happening with just a $100 budget.  This is my third time joining the challenge, and I am always so glad I did in the end!

See My Previous $100 Room Reveals

Modern Farmhouse Dining Room Reveal | Mudroom Makeover Reveal

 Modern Farmhouse Dining Room/Office Reveal

Please note: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, which allow me to make a small commission from your purchase, but your purchase price stays the same.

This trunk began as a typical black trunk with gold details, and we go way back to high school.  I have taken this trunk every place that I have ever lived, from college and on through adulthood.  And now it has made it’s journey halfway across the country with us to Texas, ha!  Wanna know what’s in it?  It is full of old photos and photo albums!  And I don’t want to store them in our attic because it gets so hot in Texas, so I decided to keep this trunk in our guest room, but the look of the trunk was not the look I was going for in this room, so of course I had to paint it, right?!?  Here it is when I got started on it.  I had already started painting the top before I remembered to snap a before photo.

Vintage Steamer Trunk Makeover

Supplies You Will Need:

DecoArt Chalky Paint- Everlasting

DecoArt Creme Wax

Fine Grit Sanding Sponge

Chalk paint and was brush

Round Bun Furniture Feet

Gorilla Glue

This is the tutorial.  It really was fairly simple.  It just took some elbow grease.

• Start by cleaning the piece and allowing time for it to fully dry.
• Use a paint brush and brush on two coats of white chalk paint.  The paint I used is DecoArt Americana Chalky Paint in the color Everlasting
• I chose not to distress my trunk after I painted it, but if you want to you can lightly sand it on the corners and in random spots on the trunk to distress it.  Now would be the time to do that.
• Protect the trunk after the sanding step using DecoArt Creme Wax in Clear.  All you do is paint it on with a brush, wait for it to dry, and then use a clean soft cloth to buff the whole thing.  This will protect your work for years to come.
• Glue bun feet to the bottom of the trunk by turning it upside down first.  I just glued each bun with the gorilla glue and then placed something heavy on each leg for two hours until the glue dried.

I decided to spend part of my budget to purchase some small bun feet to add to the bottom of this trunk to give it a little more height.  It was a tad short when it was sitting at the foot of the bed, and I wanted to raise it up to more of a bench height.  So I found these little bun feet on Amazon for less than $13, and they were already white, so I didn’t even need to paint them.  I could have painted them with my while chalk paint, but I chose not to.  I just didn’t think it was necessary, because they weren’t that noticeable. These little feet raised my trunk by two inches, and I think they added some character to the piece, so I am very happy that I spent the money for these!

This vintage steamer trunk makeover just might be my most favorite thing about this room so far!  I am so excited that I was able to utilize my vintage trunk in here.  It is the perfect spot to lay stacks of clean laundry, because my husband’s clothing is all stored in this closet and in the drawers in our guest bedroom.  He also lays things here when he is getting dressed.  And when we have guests, it will be a great place to sit luggage.  It is useful and now it is also pretty and matches my vision of the room.  Do you have any old trunk like this sitting around in your basement or attic?  If so, maybe this post will encourage you to pull it out and paint it!

Here’s one more sneak peak of this room for you before I go.  I had three weeks off for Winter break, so I completed a lot of this room over the course of one week.  Because I have a friend coming to visit this coming weekend from West Virginia, and I wanted to have this room mostly finished before she arrived.  So this room will be used for the first time since I have done anything in here.

We do have a few more finishing touches to make to the room before the big reveal in two weeks, and I think one of the things I had planned for this room is going to have to be cut for budget reasons.  But I am not quite positive yet.  I wanted to add some shelves that we already own to the wall in here.  But the brackets we need to hang them are quite pricey, so they may be cut from the reveal.  I am OK with it actually, because the main purpose of hanging shelves in this room is to display some of my husbands collections.  And those items would probably not have made it into the styled reveal anyway.  So ultimately, we will hang shelves, but just maybe not within our $100 budget for this challenge.  And truthfully, I love the room without the shelves, and if there were anyplace for my husbands collections elsewhere in the house, I would not be hanging them in here at all.  So I am totally fine with them being cut from the room for now.  Just don’t tell my husband I said that.  Hehe

To Do List for Guest Bedroom Makeover:

paint walls

Paint closet and bedroom doors

paint baseboards and trim

hang curtains

hang shelves

add a rug from another room

make over vintage trunk

add new bedding

update ceiling light

add accessories, decor, and wall art that we already have

My Budget For The Guest Bedroom Makeover So Far

Wall Paint- Valspar Bistro White:  $28.98

Door Paint- left over from kitchen island:  $0

Trim Paint- left over from breakfast room: $0

Bun feet for trunk- $12.85

Chalk Paint and Clear Wax: $0 (I already owned this from another project)

I have $58.17  left in my budget right now, and I am dangerously close to going over budget.  I am actually projecting that I will break the budget by maybe a few dollars, so I will be barely scraping by this time.  Almost half of my budget went toward bedding, so that made it really rough on the old wallet.  I haven’t taken the bedding out of the my budget yet because I haven’t revealed it in a post yet.  But that will be listed once it is revealed in the room.  Stay tuned next week to see more progress in this space, and then the big reveal is the following week!  Cannot wait!!!

You don’t want to miss the other awesome makeovers that are a part of this challenge.  Please click through below to see all of the other bloggers who are participating in the $100 Room Challenge, and you can follow along with their room makeovers as well!

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