Paint It Black

Last year I decided to try my hand at making some furniture to store my growing studio kit and other gear. The cabinet has been very useful and functional, but when I moved house in May of 2022 we unwittingly found ourselves moving on a day when the weather was very unkind to us. It poured with rain from 8am until sometime the following day. The poor gear cabinet, which I foolishly had not bothered to seal after building it, got wet and began sprouting all manner of fungi after a few months of being in our new home. 

I tried to fix this situation by applying wax and then later a wipe-on polyurethane, but alas it would simply return a few days later. To my horror one of the drawers in which I was storing my cameras and lenses was really bad but luckily I caught it before the gear got affected in any way. I bought a dry cabinet from a local online marketplace and that has been keeping my gear safe from the humidity for a while now. 

The thing is, I liked having this cabinet but I couldn’t store anything inside it because the mould growth was so bad that opening the doors appeared to present a health hazard if you breathed it in. So over the easter weekend I decided to stop messing about with external remedies that weren’t working and just tackle the problem with some sandpaper, bleach and enamel paint.

I stripped the entire thing down to the carcass, removing all the doors, the top and hardware. Using a random orbital sander with first 60 then 80 grit disks I got rid of all the visible mould and then sprayed the entire thing top to bottom with a mixture of bleach and water. After that I sanded again with 180 grit and applied 2 coats of Plascon Velvaglo satin black.

Reassembly was a bit of a pain, but one of the things I decided to do was reconfigure the layout slightly. I got rid of the drawers entirely and made the two cavities on either side equally sized. I also changed the height of the internal shelves on the two sections with doors so that I can see what’s on the shelves without having to stoop over too much.

On the right side I made a cubby that fits in the electronic dry cabinet and the plan is to build a pull out charging station in the space below that. On the other side I have added 2 shelves so that my 3 most used camera bags can fit in there. For the interested those are the ThinkTank Turnstyle 10 V2.0, a Matterport backpack and a ThinkTank Airport Advantage rolling case. The inside of the cabinet has a bunch of stuff I haven’t properly organised yet, but will do so soon.

The black Velvaglo is really amazing paint to work with. This is the non-drip version that doesn’t require stirring or any primer. I see more things in the studio turning black shortly.