Ok so here's the "before". Like pretty much everything else in our house, it's a lovingly gouged and scratched hand-me-down. It's been a super functional yet ho-hum piece of furniture for it's 20 year reign here at the Delightist Headquarters. So I finally got the gumption to do something about it.
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| Yawn |
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| Yessss! |
So I definitely don't have enough patience to give a detailed tutorial so here's a brief synopsis of what I did:
1) Cleaned the whole thing with water with a bit of TSP in it. There was to be no priming. Ain't nobody got time for that.
2) I had a smallish amount of Martha Stewart Vintage Decor paint in red, orange, and green that I did the intentionally sloppy underpainting with. See above.
3) I bought a pint of a gorgeous royal blue chalk paint (Klein Blue by General Finishes). I took about half of that and added a bit of turquoise acrylic paint to change and lighten the color a bit and then painted the whole shebang with it.
4) What was left of this mixture I added some white acrylic to in order to lighten it further and painted on the doodles with this.
5) After the doodles were really really dry, I used a damp sponge to apply a wash of the original, undoctored royal blue color over the entire piece.
6) Next:strategic sanding to give that lovely distressed look, then cleaning with tack cloth.
7) Application of finishing wax. Quick and easy to do, just follow the directions on whatever product you buy. This makes it really really nice.
8) I replaced the 2 old knobs with fabulous new ones from Anthropologie. My gawd, they have an amazing selection of knobs there.
Here's a couple more pictures:
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| details |
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| Much better. |
