Sometimes when I go to the recycling place I come away with more things that I leave there. Windows, doors, nice beams of wood, and this time an old ‘baül’ or ‘bagul’ depending on which part of the country you are in. These are steamer trunks, basically solid luggage or boxes for storage. You find them in many houses here in Catalonia, presumably all around Spain too. I don’t really know.

I forgot to take any photos before I did some work so this is the first photo, showing the trunk after I sanded and wire-brushed most of the rust off the metal and then added a coat of primer or two.

The primer step could probably have been skipped to the honest. I’m not sure it added much in value, given that I painted it with two coats immediately afterwards.

These boxes tend to be of a fairly standard structure and type - about 120 cm long, about 50 cm deep, and 50 cm high, made of rudimentary laths of thin wood, covered in sheets of tin nailed on with tacks. There are usually decorative strips of wood around the outside, but they serve no purpose beyond looking nice. The only real variants of style are in the lid, which is either flat like this one or rounded from front to back. The flat ones are more appealing to restore as the end result can serve as a coffee table.

The inside is usually protected with wallpaper. I scrapped off as much as I could initially. In the end it was easier to sand off the old wallpaper.

You can see in the inside, once you remove the old wallpaper the wood itself is fairly rough and ready. I guess these trunks were functional storage boxes, not works of art.

The tin sheeting on this one was completely intact making this an easy job. Cut or jagged metal pieces sticking out would mean having to strip it off and replace it. A lot of extra work. This one probably survived in good condition as it was stored inside.

These were the paints - an indigo shade of blue, a turquoise, and a standard black. The plan was to paint the metal in turquoise and the wooden laths in the indigo blue.

After doing a test panel of turquoise on the back, the consultant artist (AKA Number One Daughter) decided that so much turquoise would be overwhelming. So we went with the indigo for the tin and just varnished the wooden laths. The metal trim was black and in good condition, so I just redid it with more black.

The wallpaper choice was mine entirely, and is only popular with me. I don’t care, I like it. The children don’t like it, but that’s simply because they themselves are monkeys.

This was my first time ever wallpapering anything. What a fiddly job it is lining up the edge to get the pattern continuous. Next time I’ll go with stripey wallpaper.

For the cat, of course, it’s a box to sit in. She explored it for a while and then moved on.

In the end, the turquoise was only used for the inside latch, the one that prevents the lid from opening too much and falling backwards.

I added a leather handle from a strip of leather and some fixings from the hardware shop. I painted the leather to match the varnished wood, in some approximate fashion. It doesn’t look too out of place.

It turned out pretty well in the end, lots of lessons learned for next time.