Earlier this year, my Dad brought over a box full of old metal holiday cookie trays and asked me if I could use them for something.    I happily added them to my growing pile of ‘maybe someday up-cycle’ projects.

And there they sat.   For several months.  Amid a sea of stored boxes and furniture.

First with Daughter #2’s things when she moved in with us for the summer after she graduated from college, until she found a job and her own place.  Then, with my mother-in-laws things after her house was sold and until we could help her set up in her new home.

Next, it was wedding supplies and decorations.  And now, we are storing some of my oldest daughters things until she has a chance to go through it and decide what she is going to keep to be stored in our attic for the next year while she and her new husband take a gap year and travel the world.

This space, my space, has been a revolving door of storage for most of the year.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining at all.  We were and are more than happy to be able to help and store these things for our family.

The end result of all of this is, I just haven’t be able to finish as many projects as I would have liked to this year.   Which brings me back to this project and the box of metal trays that my Dad gave me.

This box of old metal cookie trays couldn’t really be put away because of all the other things we were storing.  I just set it on top of  the other boxes, which made it pretty accessible.   And, I found that I only had to scale three towering mountains of boxes to reach my stash of spray paints and my finished embossed pieces.

Not only that, but if I sucked in my breath, turned sideways and tippy-toed around another pile of boxes and furniture, I could then reach my roll of painters tape!

And so, that is how this project got completed.

I first spray painted a tray using a gloss white.   I wanted to add gold stripes,  so I attached strips of painters tape and then spray painted the tray with metallic gold.