Upcycled Magazine Files

Filing

Let’s face it, we all have a lot of paperwork! Despite the electronic era, there still seems to be a lot of paper floating around my house. Do you have the same issue? If you have a printer, you need somewhere to store your paper products right? And in the interest of attempting to keep my house as tidy as possible, I have re-purposed these old IKEA folders to fit in with my decor.

This is a super easy upcycle that you can do for your office or craft room. I did these ones up for the Craft Room project that I did as part of The $100 Room Challenge. My theme for the space was silver and hot pink, as you can see on my mood board below.

Supplies:

I incorporated some easy and affordable storage solutions for the final reveal of my finished craft room including these pretty DIY fabric storage boxes and the Magazine files, I’m about to show you! Here is what my completed craft room it looked like right after I had finished it.

And here is what it looks like now. It’s not so empty any more, the shelves are starting to fill up with projects and supplies.

IKEA Lingo?

These are old left-over IKEA file folders, You know these old blue ones? I think they were called Lingo. I don’t even think they make these anymore! They are cardboard and come flat-packed. You just have to pop them open to use them. I used to have a pretty large collection of magazines, back in the pre-pinterest days.

Into the Bin

Then when I moved, all of those old magazines went into the recycle bin. I had a lot of home decor magazines, and quite a few for Christmas crafts. I tossed the decor mags, but I kept the Craft ones, and who knows maybe you will see some of those old projects recycled on the blog next Christmas! Originally I had tossed all of the magazine files too, and then at the last minute, I reached in and grabbed a bunch of them back out of the bin. Now I’m glad that I did! These have just been up-cycled with some metallic paint and ribbon. This is a very easy project. Here is a link to plain white magazine holders that works out to just over $1 per file. So you can try out all sorts of colours and designs.

Painting

I used this metallic silver paint which I have also used on my Billy bookcase stencilling project. It comes in quite a few colours besides the silver. I have already bought the sea shell tone for a future project and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be using the blue at some point as well.

I LOVE this paint, it has really great coverage, and it’s a good shiny silver. It comes in a smaller trial size too, if you want to test it out, or test out a couple of different colours.

Hmmm, why does this remind me of buying shoes – I like these, I`ll get them in every colour! I used to collect shoes, and now I collect paint colours 🙂

I just painted directly onto the patterned file folders, and it covered in one coat and dried pretty fast. This Velvet Paint Roller that I purchased to use for my stenciling project is one of my new favourites, as well. It’s much nicer to use than the cheap foam rollers.

No Special Skills Required

Nothing technical here, just paint all sides of the file folder, which is pretty easy since you can stick your arm inside of them to maneuver them while painting. As I mentioned this paint covered nicely with just one coat. Depending on what type of roller you use using you may end up with little bubbles. I find that the foam rollers tend to do this. If that happens just run a paint brush over it after to smooth out any bubbles.

Ribbon

Once the file folders were dry I added a line of hot pink ribbon to make them pop. I suggest drawing a chalk line on your file folder using a straight edge or t-square, so that you have a guide line to go by. Attach the ribbon with spray adhesive. I didn’t use a hot glue gun for this as I wanted the ribbon to lay very flat, and hot glue can tend to be lumpy.

And for the final touch I used these labels which are one of my favourites. I have also used these in my pantry organization project. They are now a staple in my house, and guess what, they fit perfectly in the new folders that we just made 🙂 Since I made one for printer labels.

I use these in my office/craft room, to keep all of my printing supplies and paper products organized

A Little Paint Story

A while back I had seen a Pinterest photo and post with some up-cycled furniture, and it was painted with Modern Masters Warm Silver. And I absolutely fell in love with that colour. But sometimes it`s not easy to get things in Canada. I tried a bunch of different routes to get my modern masters paint. And then, I found out that I could get it through a local paint company that did a lot of work with contractors. But because it`s an imported product and special order, it ended up costing me about $150 for a gallon. Yup. And here`s the kicker, when I got the paint, it wasn`t even the colour that I wanted, because it turns out that the photo that I was so in love with, was a bit too heavily photo-shopped. So, now I have a gallon of very expensive paint that I haven`t managed to find the right project for…yet! – I will eventually find the right project for it! In the mean time, it sits in my paint cabinet in my garage. Much like my impulse purchased shoes of the past. Maybe this has something to do with being female? 😉

Replacement paint

The Rust-Oleum Metallics was my replacement paint for that project. And I love this paint, So maybe it was fortuitous in the end. I have now used the Seashell tone on a different project and I love it too! It just has such awesome coverage. And I have noticed that they are adding quite a few new colours, so others must love it as much as I do. There is something about super thick and creamy looking paint that just makes me happy.

Options

There you go, a very easy upcycle to personalize your file folders and add that little bit of sass to your office. You can change up the colours to your liking. Go wild! Such a good way to keep all of your office papers organized and pretty. Who says paperwork can’t be fun?

Thanks for stopping by!

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