Antique Potato Basket...or is it?

Ok, so those of you who follow the Facebook page might remember a few weeks ago when I excitedly posted that I found something I had been looking for for a long time.

Last year I shared my master bathroom and shared the above picture of an antique metal potato basket as something I would love to find to replace the basic plastic laundry basket under the sink.

It was functional, but not very pretty.

And then, one happy day when I was perusing the clearance aisle at Hobby Lobby I found this faux potato basket marked down to $17.  That's still a little on the expensive side for me, but I had Christmas money stashed away in my wallet so I splurged.

The only problem was, it was the wrong color and looked very "faux."

So, I gave it a few coats of spray paint.

First, I just did straight Oil Rubbed Bronze, but....

It still looked fake and it looked too "matchy matchy" with the other ORB items in the bathroom.

SO....I worked on it some more.  I'm sorry I don't have any pictures of the process, I was just wingin' it and wasn't really sure of the outcome.  

Over the ORB I sprayed a "hit or miss" coat of Rustoleum's Hammered spray paint in Silver, then did another splotchy, non-uniform coating of the hammered paint in Dark Bronze.  I finished it off by adding a layer of "rust" with Rub N' Buff in Spanish Copper.

Here it is all finished up.  From a distance you might not be able to see much of a difference.

So let's get a little closer.

And really up close to examine it's "rusty" goodness.

It was surprisingly hard to get good close ups of this thing.  Auto-focus was worthless, it kept focusing on everything beyond the basket.  In manual mode I was having trouble telling if I really had it completely in focus or not.  I needed better light.  But...none the less, you get the idea.

I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.  All the layers of paint and "rust" give it a fairly authentic look that makes you wonder, "Is it really antique or not?"

And it greatly improves the overall view of the whole sink area so much!

I love it!  And I figure since the real thing is usually priced anywhere from $60 - $175, I saved myself a whole lotta $$$!

Ok, now let's see how observant and detail oriented you are.  Who noticed, on the first time through, that one of the cabinet doors was slightly ajar in the "after" photo?  Going back and looking for it doesn't count.  : )  

                                                                  

Sharing over at:

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