Fan 'o' Recycling

My balcony is a great place to be, but when its a little too warm and I want to use it anyway: it gets stuffy because there's not a lot of air circulation, due to it being within the footprint of the building, rather than cantilevered out.
I took a gander at Home Goods to see if they had any clearance fans that could help a sister out; but they did not. Seems small, attractive fans are in high demand due to the season and therefore not likely to be on clearance: my bad.
In my parent's garage I re-found (as I'd used this thing many times) an old office fan that worked well, but looked quire unappealing.

Reliving the 80's through beige and tan.

As I do love free things, I went about making it work for me.

I took the thing apart and cleaned 20 years of dust and schmutz from the surfaces and motor. All the plastic surfaces were super smooth, so I gave them all a light sanding with a sanding block. I taped all the pieces off so the lines would be crisp and paint wouldn't get all over the blade cover. Any paint on the grating would be a pain in the @$$ to scrape off.

I primed the whole thing to further ensure that the new paint would stick to the plastic surfaces. Using some black and minty green spray paint I already had, I gave each piece several light coats. The mint colored paint did not provide great coverage, so it those pieces got about a million coats.

Because I'm in a condo, don't have a private yard, and I mainly do these projects in the evening after dark; I execute the spray painting of small objects a little oddly. With outstretched arms; I lean out over the balcony railing and work in short bursts. I wear a latex glove on the hand grasping the object so that I wont walk into work the next day sporting the overspray as a crappy hand accessory.

picture this holding fan parts

With some trial and error; I reassembled the pieces.
Blow me over: that's one good lookin fan.

A retro-redo for $0.

-Lindsay