Wow! It's been a loooonnnnggg time since my last post. I enjoyed a wonderful Christmas break with family and took a vacation from projects for a while. But now I'm back and I recently completed two projects that I started last weekend. I was given a side table a while back from my friend Heather, you can see her blog
here. This table had a lot of potential, it just needed a little sprucing up. I forgot to take a picture of it before I did anything, but it was solid red and had a Tigger knob on the drawer. After much debate, it was decided that Tigger had to go :) I spent several hours sanding the table down. Here it is halfway sanded:
I couldn't remove all the red paint but I was able to sand most of it off. Here it is after I was finished sanding:
After sanding, I decided that I should put a wood stain on the table to help cover up any remanding red paint left behind. I forgot to take a picture of the table after the stain. It looked kinda cool because the red still showed through the stain, but this wasn't even close to the look I was going for, so I then painted the table in a cream colored paint.
I still wasn't thrilled with how the table looked so I started to paint a sort of "wash" over this paint but realized that I really didn't like it. I ran to get a damp washcloth to get the new coat of paint off and then I discovered something wonderful.....as I was washing the new color of paint off, I discovered an awesome way to distress. As I rubbed with a damp washcloth, the cream color of paint was "wearing" off in a really natural looking way. And after distressing the whole table this is what I ended up with: (I have 3 different knobs for the drawer, which one do you think looks best?)
Option number one- a dingy crystal knob. It add's a little feminine touch.
Option number two- an etched bronzed knob.
Option number three (and I think it's my favorite)- a bronzed "mission style" pull.
The other table redo was a solid black table we have been using in the office/man cave and I have been wanting to do something to it for a while. Here is the table after I sanded it lightly.
Then it was on to painting. I painted several different layers. Before I started painting, I got a bar of Dove soap and rubbed it over all the edges and some on the top of the table. I read online that this prevents the paint from fully absorbing in those places and makes it easy to distress those areas later. For the first layer of paint I chose a taupe grayish color and lightly painted the entire table. Then I rubbed soap over some areas again and painted an aqua/minty blue/green very lightly over the gray. Once again I put some soap on the table in certain spots and painted a top coat "wash" of white. Once this was dry I used the washcloth technique I described above to age and distress the table. The first picture is after it was painted and then once it was distressed.
I'm pretty happy with how each table turned out. What do you think?
Love you all!
-Amy
