Good morning all!
Jared and I love the look of antique furniture. A couple weeks ago, we heard of a monthly antique fair in Allegan, Michigan from my older sister, and decided to give it a shot. While we were there, we quickly learned that dragging yourself out of bed a couple hours early to get there when it's cool is definitely worth it! The fair was really neat, with lots of vendors and treasures, but it was so hot! But it was worth it too. Our original goal was to find some cool wooden chairs like these:
My goals is to collect 4 chairs like these, paint them a unifying color and add some cushions. Unfortunately, finding chairs that actually work has proved...well...impossible so far! That'll hopefully be a later project. But anyway, instead of finding chairs, we found these--
We thought they would work great as night stands, but they needed a little work, so took them with us to Jared's parents' house, and spent a wonderful afternoon in the garage working with our hands. First, we took off the drawer pulls that had been glooped up with paint. We were planning on just buying new ones, but I liked the antique look of these and thought it'd be fun to find out what's underneath all that paint first. We threw those in a bucket of paint thinner, and waited an hour. The results were amazing! Almost all the paint came off, and what didn't could be scraped off with some steel wool. After that, Jared's mom was a trooper and spent an hour and a half buffing and polishing them to a shine with a dremel tool. They came out looking amazing, perfectly aged and worn, so we decided to use them. But we added a coat or two of lacquer to keep the shine and prevent discoloration.
After that, our top priority was to fill in some of those gouges on the tops. We like a few texturizing bumps and scratches, but these tops were beyond everyday wear and tear--it looked like someone had taken a hammer to them! With the help of Jared's dad, we filled in the gouges with Bondo. It took a couple times of filling, drying and sanding before it came out how we wanted it, but it made all the difference.
Our next step was the biggie--painting! We decided on black, since we are getting a wrought iron bed and thought this would accent it nicely. We had opted against stripping the paint from the actual stands, and since we were then painting over an already painted surface, we decided to use paint brushes to get some brush strokes. This helps create the illusion of wood grain. After it dried, we grabbed our sand paper and sanded down the edges to create that worn look. Here, we ran into a couple problems. Some areas didn't seem quite dry, even though they should have been, and the paint peeled instead of sanding away. In other areas, we were simply sanding down to that white paint underneath instead of the wood, creating too much contrast. In the end, I discovered that sanding the areas with only wood underneath worked, and with a lot of patience and finesse, we finally got the look we wanted. Then, Jared smudged on some watered down, dark brown acryllic paint over the whole piece. This gave it more texture, more of a wood look, and warmed up the black paint a bit. Plus, it helped cover up the areas where there was still too much contrast. In the end, these were our final products.
No comments:
Post a Comment