Refinishing Vintage Lockers

Wow, welcome to week 6 of the Spring ORC: Refinishing Vintage Lockers for your home. This week we will showing how we refinished our found, vintage lockers as we finish the basement for our home gym.

Welcome to week 6 of the spring season of the ORC: Refinishing Vintage Lockers. This season we will be designing our Home Gym located in our basement, that we have been finishing out over the past year. So, this will be a fun room for the next 8 weeks as we build walls, and see this room take shape literally from the start to the finish line.

WEEKS AT A GLANCE:

WEEK 1     WEEK 2     WEEK 3   WEEK 4    WEEK 5

WEEK 6    WEEK 7

REVEAL

Just in case you maybe wondering exactly what The One Room Challenge is, here is the link, and the scoop. This event was originally started by Linda Weinstein @ Calling It Home. It is currently hosted twice a year, in May and October for the past 17 seasons. The ORC has hosted over 600 interior designers & home decor bloggers, that have joined together in this challenge to makeover one room in their own homes.  The participants have a total of six weeks, from start to finish, to complete a full room transformation. Over 5,000 rooms have been transformed through the One Room Challenge to date, and many spaces have been recognized and featured by several prestigious sites, like Better Homes and Gardens the hosting media site this season.

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Inspiration Board: The Home Gym

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The Vintage Locker Refinishing DIY:

This is such a fun week that we are sharing with you all! This week we are refinishing vintage lockers that we found in a local antique store, almost two years ago with this room in mind. We found a set of four of the these vintage 1960-1970 Penco employee style lockers, which had been harvested from a break room, somewhere. While they still had the original hardware on them, it was clear that they had been repainted from and original rusty orange color to the vibrate red color for selling purposes, since the paint was sadly all over the hardware. It also coated the 1950’s style vintage Berger Steel Industrial Number Tags, as well. These lockers were so vintage they even came with their very own vintage gum still stuck inside, LOL! Ewww! Yes we scraped that out, no vintage gum for us, sorry. I am all about preserving posterity, but that was a little much.  After removing the hardware, which is really what should have happened the first time, these beauties were painted. I took them to the backyard and cranked up “Paint it Black”, because “I see a red door and I want to paint it black.” Yeah my neighbors probably think I am nuts, or at least mildly entertaining. Sure I could have made a Tik Tok video of it and posted it, but why? Use your imagination, a middle aged woman in short shorts, dancing around to the Rolling Stone, huffing spray paint, yeah no one should see that, let alone video tape it! Besides all the music I like has copyrights on it, because those artist are way too smart, get your royalties peeps, you  deserve it!Anyways back to the DIY, here are the lockers with the first coat of the Rustoleum Paint+Primer spray paint. A single coat pretty much took care of this project, in just a just a few minutes, with only a few minor touch ups here and there. This stuff works great! The next step of this process was to add in the replacement side walls and shelves. We had originally thought about affixing these to the front of a pre built bookcase as seen in my original vision board, or recessing them into a wall. However after some thought on the matter we decided we wanted to take them with us when we move, so creating a cabinet with MDF was going to be the way to go.It is basically like building a bookcase in place, the MDF boards were the perfect width to slide directly into the existing locker fronts and then held into place with screws through the existing holes in the sides. Honestly, this may have been the exact wood or boards that were used to begin with, and it had just degraded over the years. We created separate sections and a shoe bin at the bottom as well. The top sections were each designated for larger items like lunch boxes or coolers since these were originally employee lockers.Then I painted the outside of the MDF boards with the same matching Tricorn Black paint from Sherwin Williams, that I used for the brick wall. Using my trusted HANDy paint bucket and mini roller for this smaller paint project. The always have the perfect size for any job and clean up is always a breeze with the disposable liners. As you can see the lockers look amazing, and love the new color for our home gym space. These will make a great storage space in this area and go nicely with the entire gym theme. Vintage lockers have become so popular over the past few years, I am so glad that we were able to snatch these up a few years back and just house them until this project came up on the docket.Here is a fun little factoid, the vintage numbers on the lockers actually lined up with Ron’s and my birthday years, which for us just made the purchase even better when we bought them. Also I like how there are still little hints of the red peeking through, it is a little nod to our Georgia Bulldogs, and a little peek into the history of these great lockers at the same time.

THE PROPOSED SCHEDULE: 

WEEK 1: Introduction & Inspirations

WEEK 2: Insulate Walls & Paint/Seal Concrete Walls

WEEK 3: Build Out Walls for Bathroom & Sauna

WEEK 4: Run Electrical, Set Light Boxes, & HVAC ducts

WEEK 5: Add Brick Walls (Painted) & Sheetrock

WEEK 6: Vintage Locker Build Out Project

WEEK 7: Set Faux Wood Padded Floor Squares for Workout Space

WEEK 8: REVEAL