Guest Post-Cre8tive Designs Inc Repurposed Suitcase/dog bed

I am so excited to share this great repurpose with you from my good friend Stephanie!  We’ve never met in real life, but that doesn’t matter-we are bbfs.  (best blog friends).  We HAVE skyped, so that is the next best thing to meeting in real life, right? 

I am pretty darn excited to finally have a re-purposed project to share here on Gail's blog!  My re-purposed projects are no way close to what Gail does, I usually enlist my husband to do all that complicated {well to me} stuff that Gail does here on My Re-purposed Life.

My good friend asked me recently if I would be willing to make a vintage suitcase dog bed for a charity auction for the local Boys & Girls Club.  One of the items they were auctioning off was a puppy from the Human Society.  Who can't resist a puppy right? She thought it would be cute to have a vintage suitcase dog bed to be included with the puppy.  How could I say no to that?  Even though I have never made one before, I figured it couldn't be too hard, so I immediately said "Sure!  How big does it need to be and will it be a girl or boy dog?"  That is when it got a little complicated.  She said she wouldn't know what type of dog or the sex of the dog before the auction.  Yikes!  I thought I was going to have a blank canvas at first  but now I had constraints. Oh well, I am always up for a challenge.

So off to the thrift stores I went, and was so happy to be able to find the perfect size hard shell vintage suitcase.  I didn't take a picture of the before but it looked similar to this one:

source

It was a medium size, which I thought would be good for most dogs.

As an interior designer, one of the things that I always find that blends with any style is black. I always add something black to the room. A hint of black in a room really adds elegance and grounds the room.  I consider black as a neutral, it goes with everything.  So with this concept in mind, I decided using black as the main color was going to be my safest route.

I wanted to showcase the silver against the black, so I tediously used blue tape to mask off all of the hardware and decorative elements.

Then I sprayed the outside of the suitcase with black chalkboard paint.

The inside was already a  pretty lavender fabric which I wanted to keep.  I bought a furry dog bed in a deep eggplant color  from HomeGoods that fit perfectly inside the bottom of the suitcase.

But then I was thinking, what if the dog was a boy?  Would purple and black be too girly?  And then luckily for me, my friend called and said she had seen the dog and it was a girl.  Whew.  I lucked out on that!  Plus she sent me a picture and the dog was black and white, how fitting!

My plan was to write the saying "All You Need Is Love...And A Dog" on the side of the suitcase with a chalkboard pen.  I used my handy dandy Silhouette machine to cut out the saying. {I finally bought one after months of seeing how much Gail loved hers}  But when I tried to fill in the letters,  the surface of the suitcase was textured and it just wasn't working.  So now it was on to plan "b"

I have a TON of these wood shims.  I was going to make a sunburst mirror out of them one day but never did.

So I took 4 of them, cut them in half with a hand saw.   I used two of the left over cut pieces on the back and glued them across the four slats to hold them together with just plain old white glue.

I sprayed painted the shims with Heirloom White, and added the letters over the top and then sprayed them with a flat black. {Gail has a lot of tutorials on her site to show you how to this, that is how I learned the process}  I used fine sandpaper to distress it a bit.

I wanted to keep the upper portion of the suitcase in tact to hang my sign.  But it needed to be stable so that when the dog jumped into the bed the lid wouldn't fall on her.  So I enlisted my husbands help.  Luckily for me, he is an inventor, so I just have to tell him my idea and he figures it out. He modified a hinge I got from Home Depot to fit on the side of the suitcase.

It easily pulls off the screw and folds down inside the suitcase, if for some reason you wanted to close the suitcase.  Brilliant isn't he?

He even cut a slit in the metal part to hold the screw where it slides to fold away...so dang smart he is!

Now that the suitcase was secure, I was able to hang my sign.  I used a vintage brooch tied with a ribbon to hang it on the inside of the lid.  I hot glued the bottom straight on to the fabric so it wouldn't dangle.

The last part was to add some legs.  I wanted them to look vintage and I had this $1.99 thrift shop paper towel holder for awhile. {Again, from a project I was going to do, but never did—seems I do that a lot}  So I unscrewed the dowel, and cut it into four equal parts.  I drilled holes in the top and bottom of the dowels so that I could screw in knobs for the feet and secure them to the suitcase. {I got the crystal knobs from Homegoods}

I really wanted to dress up the sides of the suitcase with a stripe or decorative scrolls.  But in the end I opted to just leave it plain since this was to be in someone's house, and it needed to be universal in color, using just black seemed to be safe.  I added a big soft dog toy and a boxed set of  leash accessories inside the bed and gave it to my friend. {oh and this is about the time my Nikon camera died, so I was only able to take pictures with my iPhone of the finished bed }

The good news is, the dog and the vintage suitcase bed were a huge hit at the auction!  They received $1,300 for the dog and her bed.  I am so happy to have been a part of the whole process.  And not to mention I now know how to make a vintage suitcase dog bed!  Thanks for having me over Gail!

Stephanie—I love your dog bed!  What a great repurpose!  I too have spray painted a suitcase, taping off all the hardware—not fun!   I think it is fantastic that the dog and the bed raised so much money for such a great cause!

You should really hop over to Stephanie’s blog Cre8tive Designs Inc, she’s really quite brilliant in her designs!  You might want to check out how she painted her bar-b-que , or how she did a makeover on a vinyl chair.

Thank you so much Stephanie for being a guest blogger on My Repurposed Life!

gail

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