It’s possible by now that if you’re one of my followers that you’ve seen my $10 Washer and Dryer makeover.
Basically I took a $7 can of enamel paint and with only 3 coats, totally made over the look of this set. I followed it up by spraying the knobs chrome and using a paint pen for the settings. The one downfall? I didn’t take detailed photos, so a lot of the settings were missing.
These puppies have held up great over the past year, until I tossed a rag with cleaning solvents on the washer and forgot about it for a few hours. That’s when this happened:
Yeah. I dissolved a quarter-sized glob of paint! Since I was breaking out the can to repair the chip, I decided to bite the bullet and redo the controls as well. First came scraping off the paint so I could see the settings.
Then I took some detailed close ups of the settings to re-create in my Silhouette software. First I drew the colored shapes in Illustrator, and imported them into my Silhouette and used the tracing tools to get my outline. I added in all the words, but they were just too tiny. Half of them didn’t cut right and I had serious issues getting 15 point font letters out of the vinyl! So I just called it a day and put on the vinyls and used a fine-tipped paint pen to write in the words.
Now I finally know which settings to use, instead of blindly guessing!
It really did make a huge difference. I’m happy I took the time to fix this.
So if any of you are on the fence about painting, I highly encourage it! If you don’t have a fancy cutting machine, you can take detailed photos of your controls, print them out, and have them turned into a magnet or sticker. Or even just mod podge it straight onto the backers. Or you could just leave the control panel unpainted. So many options!
4 comments
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Our Wired Lives (@OurWiredLives)
September 12, 2012 at 8:52 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Totally impressed. I wish I had an appliance to paint over!
Allie
September 12, 2012 at 9:54 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Love the way the controls look with the silver oval backdrops!
Ira Morse
September 13, 2012 at 4:22 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Nice handwriting, love your ideas and there is something missing, try put some arts at the front of your dishwater.
Jamilet
November 12, 2012 at 6:19 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Thank you!, so doing this to my washer and dryer
, will send photos afterward.