Farmhouse Style Basket Makeover with Chalk Paint

Hey guys! Today I’m sharing how I made over my outdated wicker basket to give it a little farmhouse charm. It’s my contribution to this month’s Thrifty Style Team blog hop where I get together with the ginormously talented ladies below to bring you thrifty decor projects that won’t break the bank! You can see everyone’s projects for this month at the end of this post!

Redhead Can Decorate | 2 Bees in a Pod | At the Picket Fence | Bliss Ranch | Chatfield Court| Cottage at the Crossroads | The How-To Home | DIY Beautify | Duke Manor Farm | I Should be Mopping the Floor | Salvage Sister and Mister | Smart Fun DIY | The Painted Hinge | What Meegan Makes Homeroad The Creek Line House

This project started out with this basket becoming too small for what I was using it for – a toy basket for our 10 cats. We have a monthly subscription for cat toys (they have subscriptions for everything these days!) and this basket quickly became too small to hold them all. I bought a large trunk-style basket for the cat toys, which left this basket without a purpose. I decided to use it for this month’s thrifty project and hope it’d inspire me to find a new use for it!

Here’s what I used for this project:

• Rust-Oleum Chalked Spray Paint in Aged Gray
• Rust-Oleum Chalked Protective Top Coat in Matte Clear
• Rust-Oleum Chalked Paint in Linen White
• Rust-Oleum Chalked Decorative Glaze in Smoked
• Chalk paint brush
• Plastic gloves
• Cotton rags

The links below are affiliate links for the supplies I used in this project. If you choose to purchase through these links, I will make a small commission off of your purchase, but it won’t cost you a penny more! If you do make a purchase through one of my affiliate links, thank you so much for helping support my blog!

I sprayed the basket with chalk paint to give it a good starting base. If you’ve painted a wicker basket with a brush, you know it’s difficult to get the paint in all the little nooks and crannies in the basket. Using spray paint makes it so much faster and easier.

It was raining the day I did this project so I did this step in our shop. You can see my boneyard of project pieces in the background waiting for me to make them over.

Once the spray paint dried, I brought the basket back in our house and applied the glaze, working it in the nooks and crannies with my brush and wiping off the excess with a cotton cloth. I didn’t worry about getting it into all the nooks and crannies since I was going for a multi-toned dimensional look.

One thing I noticed about the chalk spray paint is that it doesn’t absorb the glaze like regular chalk paint. In retrospect, I would have used a darker chalk spray paint at first as my base and then used lighter chalk paint colors to add more dimension.

Once the glaze was dry, I applied the Linen White chalk paint using a very dry brush, just sweeping over the outermost ridges of the basket. What I mean by a dry brush is that I lightly dabbed the brush into the paint, then swirled it around on a piece of paper until the paint was evenly distibuted on the brush.

Once the paint was dry, I sealed it using the Matte Clear protective top coat.

While I was in the process of making this basket over I decided I’d use it to hold our magazines. But I figured that would make for pretty boring “after” pictures, so I filled it with a bunch of farmhouse stuff and staged it on our dining room table as a centerpiece. I might just use it like this after all! 🙂

Here’s the rest of this month’s projects from the Thrifty Style Team ladies!

I hope you enjoyed my project for this month’s Thrifty Style Team!