Chippy Farmhouse End Table

It may be Monday, but I finally finished up a lingering project, soooo I'm feeling okay about it. 

What lingering project did I finish? The end table for our family room - finally! It's a solid wood, antique Ethan Allen piece, and was a $20 Craigslist find. If you follow me on Instagram, you may recall this picture from forever ago:

That's just about the only picture I can find, so consider it my "before" shot! 

I decided to finally put my Miss Mustard Seed Milk Paint to use on this table, and I'm so glad I did. My original plan was to do the top with milk paint, and then paint the base with chalk paint. Except... I fell head-over-heels for the milk paint as soon as I started using it, and the original plan was scrapped in favor of all milk paint.

Below is the table top after one coat of milk paint - I used Miss Mustard Seed's linen color. When I mixed the paint, I used a 1:1 ratio of paint (it comes in powder form) to water. For this top, I painted some on the table, and then used a spray bottle filled with water to further dilute the paint and spread it. I really love the minimal coverage look, and how the wood grain still shows through. If you wanted full coverage, I'd recommend 1-2 coats of paint mixed using a 1:1 paint to water ratio.  

And that was it for the top! (I had previously sanded off the dark stain, leaving a natural, light wood to begin with). 

For the base, I used the same 1:1 ratio to mix the paint, and it covered so well. The base was really unevenly sanded, and still had a lot of the dark stain left on it If you use milk paint on raw wood, the wood will soak it in (like the table top). However, if you layer milk paint over existing stain/finishes with no bonding agent, it will get flaky and chippy. Sign me up!

It's a little hard to tell in this picture, but after about an hour of drying, the paint started to crackle and chip off in some areas. At that point, I sanded it with a medium grit paper, distressed the edges a bit, and called it a day! Not before sealing it with my beloved Minwax finishing wax, of course!  

And the "after" shot:

I'm so happy with how this table turned out, and am dying to slather milk paint on everything I own now! 

What do you think? Would you want an end table that's this chippy or do you prefer a cleaner look?

How to Make New Wood Look Weathered

One style that I absolutely love is the old/weathered/distressed wood look. The more aged and banged up it appears, the better!

When Ryan and I decided to take on a DIY coffee table makeover, I knew that I wanted the end result to be a reclaimed wood farmhouse table. After a little messing around, that's exactly what we have!

So, how did I get my brand-spankin' new Home Depot wood to look old? It was a combination of trial and error, Googling, magic, and beating the crap out of it. 

The first step was to sand down the oak boards we bought. Once they were smooth and the risk of splinters had been eliminated, it was on to step two - the beat the crap out of it phase. 

You can get creative when distressing wood - it's pretty fun (and great anger management, ahem). 

Some of the techniques I used were:

• Hitting it with both sides of a hammer 
• Smacking it with a bag of screws
• Whipping it with a chain
• Running the edge of a large screw over the surface
• Sanding - beyond just sanding the splinters out, we sanded some imperfections into the wood, rounded out the sides a bit, etc. 

So yeah, things got a little crazy in the garage. Basically anything that's heavy and metal, you can use to show your wood who's boss.

Once you've distressed the boards to your desired level, it's time to stain them! Also, stain is called stain for a reason - be sure you wear gloves, or you might end up with a permanently gray left hand. Not that this happened to me or anything... just a hypothetical warning...

This is where trial and error comes into play. For my wood, I used Weathered Gray stain from Varathane for my first coat. I applied the stain with an old paint brush, and then immediately wiped it off using an old T-shirt. I'd paint a few strokes, wipe-wipe-wipe, paint a few strokes... you get the picture. 

After the weathered gray stain was applied. 

I used this same technique for each layer of stain or paint that I applied, and it resulted in a great weathered wood look. You don't want to layer paint on too heavily and cover up the wood grain of the boards. 

The stain dried pretty quickly - I let the boards sit about 30 minutes in between coats, but I probably didn't even need to wait that long. 

For my second coat, I mixed some white primer that I had on hand with equal parts water. I used the same technique of painting it on then wiping it off with a T-shirt.  

After coat number two. This look is the result of gray weathered stain and white washing. 

The third coat was flat gray paint mixed with water, again in equal parts. Brush-brush-brush. Wipe-wipe-wipe. You can use any gray paint you have on hand. I bought a sample size of Creek Bend by Behr, but any flat gray paint will do!

The fourth and final coat was black paint, which I didn't mix with any water. I dipped the top of the brush lightly into the paint, wiped some off on the side of the container, then lightly brushed it on the boards. I stuck to the same brush on, wipe off technique. This kept the brush strokes from showing, and blended all of the coats of paint and stain into the wood. You can go easier or heavier on the black, depending on the look you're going for.

And that's it! Four coats and one gray hand later, I had this:

Feel free to play around with different stains and paints to get the look you're going for. This table turned out more on the gray side (gray paint, gray stain, DUH), but you could use brown stain and paint if you prefer that look. 

Don't forget to check out our coffee table makeover that this top ended up on!

Have you ever tried to make new wood look old? What techniques did you use? 

Vintage Dresser Makeover

Today, in honor of #relovedmonday (have you checked out that hashtag on instagram? It’s a good one!) I’m finally posting our master bedroom vintage dresser makeover! This one is a long time coming, considering I purchased the dresser almost 3 months ago. Let’s get to it!

I found this baby on Craigslist for $60. She looked pretty rough, but I knew she had a lot of potential under all of that dark stain. Here’s a before picture, looking a little worse for the wear.

I began by removing the drawer hardware and sanding the entire piece… which was easier said than done. Oh goodness, this thing was an absolute pain to sand. The dark stain took a lot of elbow grease to remove, and I had to call in the big guns (ahem, Ryan) quite a few times to help me. Overall, I probably spent 2 weeks getting everything sanded down, working in small stretches.

Once the sanding was over, the real fun began. I knew I wanted the body and top of the dresser to be slightly different from the drawers, but it took me a bit to figure out exactly what look I wanted to go with.

I ended up staining everything the same color, and then adding a whitewash to the drawers. For the first coat of stain, I used Minwax Special Walnut. Once that dried, I used Rust-oleum’s driftwood stain for the second coat. When applying the driftwood stain, I worked in small sections, painting it on with a foam brush, and then immediately wiping it off with a rag. Here’s a closeup of the end result:

It’s definitely imperfect, but that’s the look that I love! You can also still see some of the original dark stain in the wood grain, which I think adds even more character to the piece. If you don’t like that look, then make sure your piece is completely sanded down before you start staining!

After the stain was dry, I took the additional step of whitewashing the drawers. I mixed flat white paint that I had on had with equal parts water, and brushed it on. This resulted in the drawers looking slightly lighter than the body and top of the dresser, giving me that subtle contrast that I wanted.

To finish off the entire piece, I used my favorite Minwax Finishing Wax in Natural.

After that, it was time for the icing on the cake - hardware! I had an idea of what I wanted, but didn’t like the prices I was finding. This is part of the reason this darn thing took me months to finish. Eventually, I bit the bullet and ordered the hardware. It ended up being almost as expensive as the entire dresser, but I L-O-V-E it!

I got these brass cup pulls for the top drawer, and these matching brass card catalog pulls for the bottom drawers. My trusty handyman (ahem, Ryan) drilled the holes for all of the pulls, and then screwed them all in with the tiniest screw driver known to man (Yes, he is in fact the greatest).

And <s> 3 months later</s> just like that, we had the after photo! 

I’m so happy to finally have this piece finished and actually living in the master bedroom! The wait was worth it.

What do you think of this vintage dresser makeover? Do you love the hardware as much as I do!?

DIY Rustic Coffee Table Makeover

So, I've finally stopped staring at our amazing new coffee table long enough to come write about how we made it! Needless to say, I absolutely LOVE it, and am so thrilled with how it turned out. It was pretty easy too. 

Our coffee table started out here:

So you may not think the "before" is that bad, but both Ryan and I hated this table. It's just not our style at all. Glass top - shudder.  

I had a rustic, farmhouse-style table in mind for the after. The plan was to paint the base of the existing table, and then create a weathered wood top to screw into the existing top. (Details on how we made our new wood look old and weathered here).

Step one was painting the table base. We went with Americana Decor chalk pain in Lace for the color. Chalk paint has a lot of benefits, including the fact that it easily covers and sticks to non-wood and finished surfaces with no sanding or priming. It was pretty streaky after just one coat, as you can see below, but looked much better after the second coat was applied. 

After the first coat, pretending to be Nicole Curtis in my glasses, ha! 

After staring at the base in this color for a day, I decided it still needed a little somethin' somethin'. Enter the gray wash. I mixed two parts gray paint (the same one I used for the planks) and one part water, and brushed that onto the base of the table. Immediately after brushing it on, I used a T-shirt to rub it into the wood. This gave it a cool, weathered finish without showing brush strokes.

Once the base and wood planks were both dry, we arranged the top onto the base where we wanted it. 

All that was left was to attach the two! Minor details, huh? Our original plan was to screw the top onto the bottom, but then I realized I didn't want screws showing - I wanted nail heads instead. After marking off where each nail would go, we drilled pilot holes, making sure to go all the way through both the top and the base. 

The next issue was the nails that we had - they were bright silver, which is soooo not rustic. Ha. Our solution? Spray paint them black! We stuck the nails through a piece of cardboard to make spraying easy peasy. 

We realized that once we started hammering these into the table, the hammer was going to take some of the spray paint off the nails. That actually ended up being okay, because I really liked the look of the partially-painted nail heads. If you want perfectly black nail heads, I don't know what to tell you. Actually, I guess I'd tell you to just go buy black nails in the first place. 

And that's pretty much it! Here's the table in all her glory:

I just love it! And now I'm itching to get my hands on all of our other furniture! 

What do you think? Do you like our new table?