Houston Texans Painted Cooler

Ok, so this took forever, and to be perfectly honest....it is still going to take another couple of days. 

The hubs and I were just talking last week about buying a new cooler. Ours was beat up, faded, ugly, and gross. Was it time to just get a new one, or should I just revamp what we already had. 

If you read the blog, you know that we are HUGE Houston Texans fans. The answer was yes...revamp it. And if it sucks, we can buy a new one. I wanted to try it. 

I told Josh to bear with me. Give me a week, and let me try to turn it into something much nicer. And he did. 

If you want to paint your own cooler, be prepared for it to take several days. Between sanding, prepping, painting, drawing, repainting, modge podging, and sealing...it take a while. 

So here is the process:

First, I cleaned this crappy cooler with household cleaner and water. 

I gave the whole cooler a quick sand just to rough up the plastic a bit. You could use joint compound to fill in all the branding, but then you have to wait for it to dry and then sand the whole thing down to make it all flush. I wanted to keep the texture and branding on the cooler because I like it. Honestly, no. I was just lazy and impatient and was ready to get this show on the road. 

Then I used a primer paint for plastic and gave the whole cooler a light coat. I spray painted the whole top white. 

I new I wanted to personalize the top with our name, so I free handed our last name in pencil first and then painted it twice with red paint. 

Then I painted the rest of the top with a couple of coats of red as well.

Time for the body of the cooler. Blue. I painted the whole thing blue and it took 3 coats. I let each coat dry for several hours before painting the next coat. 

Then I freehanded the Houston Texans logo and the slogan, "Bulls on Parade" on the side with pencil. I painted those both in, but it took 4 coats for this. Tedious and time consuming but I love how it turned out. 

The handles were also painted red...and I am loving the red, white, and blue look for sure. 

And here is where it sits. Jansen thinks I should paint a large football on the other side, and I still might. But that will have to be tomorrow. And I am not going to paint anything on the ends because of the hardware. .It would just be covering up all my hard work, and that is no good for me. 

The final steps include giving the entire cooler a nice coat of Modge Podge to seal it, and then covering it in a couple coats of glossy polyurethane to make it shiny. 

I am happy with how it turned out. Not too fancy, simple but personalized. I will post the absolute final photo once I have slept and figured out if I am going to paint the other side and seal it. 


Linked to: