Display Cabinet Makeover

A month ago now, I purchased a display cabinet on eBay. I mentioned in a previous post how I decided to make it over in order that it fitted in with the living room décor and how I wanted to use it to house my mum's china tea service.

I believe the service was a retirement gift after 30 or more years working at the same company and just a couple of years after retiring she sadly died and never even got to use it. As a consequence, I've always wanted to have it on display somewhere in the house, but have never had an appropriate place to put it. It has been sat in a box and then in the vestibule cupboard for the last 18 years, so it was now the time to get it out and find a proper home for it.

We collected the cabinet from a seaside town and brought it home and here's a picture of the cabinet as it was when I bought it:

Although I liked this distressed cream colour, I decided to paint it grey and proceeded to masking tape  up the glass so I didn't get paint on it.  It was a bit fiddly and took a while (three days in total!), but eventually it was masked and then painted and I was very happy with the result.

Here's the finished result:

The only problem left was that the cabinet didn't have any legs and so was a little short. If fact, the legs had been ripped off it, leaving unsightly gauges in the base, so once I'd found and bought some wooden Queen Anne legs on eBay (again), OH painted them, filled in the damage to the base and then attached the legs and the cabinet was properly finished off.

The legs fitted perfectly and I think they really suit the cabinet. He also added an LED strip of lights inside to illuminate the contents.

Today, I finally put my mum's china tea service in the cabinet. I thought I might get a few other things in, but it was really only big enough for the tea service and keeping it simple and unfussy felt right. 

Here's a couple of pictures of the final result:

I put the lights on to demonstrate their effect and also because it was a very rainy grey day today. I'm super happy with the transformation and I hope my mum would be pleased to see her tea service displayed so splendidly.