DIY Pet Food Storage

SO I NEEDED A convenient and stylish place to store my dogs food. The cat is easier - his food and bowls have a designated cat area (see our DIY here!) Done. The dog is harder. She is big and so is her food bag! So I began to search for ideas on the web and found several great ideas...

This is the one that I actually used from Tidymom.net. She did an amazing job turning an old popcorn tin into a dog food storage container. Find the info here.

There are a few pet food containers commercially available, but the "designer" ones tend to be in the $50 + range (The lovely ones below are from Ballard Designs). That seems a little pricey for me, and I am a hardcore DIY-er with anything I can copy, so...challenge accepted.

I, too, found an old popcorn tin and gave it new life as a dog food container. It was fairly easy to do, and the best part for me, as a veterinary technician, is I know it is a food safe container. You can find these at thrift stores, but you can also find them new at various times of the year, filled with popcorn, for holidays like Easter, July 4th (yup), and of course, Christmas. Again I am a stickler for safety so I found a new one, and served the yummy caramel popcorn at a party we had! Then, ta-da, a new popcorn tin just for my project.

After priming the tin using a spray primer, I painted mine a metallic silver, using spray paint from Home Depot. I really wanted that almost industrial look, and it worked really well. The bonus to using the metallic spray paint is that any slight imperfections created a kind of vintage vibe, and does not look like I messed up my paint job. LOL.

Using my Cricut Explore I created my labels and put one on each side of the tin. I will say that you could also easily use stencils and get a similar effect. I used "Good Dog" and a laurel branch on each side for the text, but you could, of course, write "Dog Food", or your pets name too! Get creative!

If you've read some of my other posts, you may remember my house is small, so this giant tin lives at the end of my kitchen counter, for all to see. But, thanks to TidyMom.net, and a few similar projects on Pinterest, it looks AMAZING! And best of all (especially for my hubby) it is easy access to feed the pup. Try it and share!