Distressing Furniture *DIY*

I almost wrote that I have a love/hate relationship with stained wood furniture.

In fact, I did write that and then my conscience started bothering me because I feel like I probably need to be truthful. Honesty is the best policy and what-not.

I hate glossy wood furniture.

It just looks humiliated to me.

Maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit, I have plenty of stained and sealed furniture in my home - it's just really not my favorite. It's at the very bottom of the list of things that didn't make the cut on my favorite list, somewhere between cold showers and canned asparagus.

Just let it be rough and natural or paint the stuff.

Anyway, our bedroom (which is still a major work in progress) was filled with nothing but shiny stained wood furniture and this weekend we did something about it.

We ended up sanding, priming, painting, distressing and staining the living daylights out of three pieces over the weekend including a small bedside stand/thingy, a desk, and our bed. We still have a dresser to do but since Brad left me alone this morning (he said it had something to do with providing for our family...?) and since I'm not strong enough to haul the 500 lb monster downstairs to the garage alone (I know... it's a real shock) that thing will have to deal with me another day.

Here is the only picture I had the presence of mind to take before we tackled the bed. 

Let's go ahead and make a best friend pact that you're going to ignore the mass pandemonium in the dark recesses of our garage captured in this picture and several more coming up. 

Pinky promise and cross your heart and junk. 

Here's a tiny peek at the end result: 

Ah, the desk. 

Before:

After: 

Last but not least, this...thing. Not sure what to call it. Truth be told, I debated leaving this the way it was, it didn't have any stain or sealer on it at all and I really liked the rough wood. I needed to practice distressing something though and this was the guinea pig. 

Before:

After:

I really like the way all three pieces turned out, the bed is my favorite for sure but you'll have to wait to see more of that until a little later... 

So how does one distress furniture? Well, as a totally amateur painter and do it yourself kinda girl, this was my method - it has its flaws I'm sure so feel free to tweak it and make it your own. 

1. Sand The Stuff  - Sand down your furniture if it's been stained and sealed so that it will accept a new coat of paint, some people sand it down totally but really you just need to rough up the surface enough to grip the new coat of paint. 

2. Prime - You need an oil based primer - again this is only necessary if you're working on a piece that's been stained before...

Prime the furniture and let it dry - be prepared to throw away your paint brush unless you enjoy tedious cleaning jobs. I don't, so I just used a cheap brush and tossed it. 

3. Paint - Choose your paint color and go to town! You can use latex or oil-based if you've primed the furniture with an oil-based primer. I picked a cream for my bed and that other piece of furniture that I simply can't find a name for - can anyone help me there? What is that thing called? 

Anyway, I picked a Behr paint, the color is Moon Beam and it covered really well. 

The color I chose for the desk is Hosta (I think?) and it's a Behr color as well. It's just a basic teal.

4. DISTRESS! This is the fun part, this is when you really make the piece your own. There are a lot of methods used to distress and antique furniture so you have a lot of flexibility there in how your furniture turns out. 

Sanding - yep, you get to sand again. Hit the edges, areas where your furniture would wear out naturally. Use a finer grit sand paper for this portion and make sure you've allowed the furniture time to dry completely, it may even take a few days. 

Beat it up - ok, this is where I deviated from the typical distressing method. I beat up a small portion of my bed (a side board) with a chain, hit the edges a few times with a pair of pliers and honestly it's just a bit too much for me. I think it would look better like that on my dresser but since the lines on my bed are very feminine I didn't want to overwhelm it with the amount of distressing I did. 

Use your own judgement there but remember that less is better with distressing - you can always beat it up more later but once you take a chunk out of the wood with a chain you can't do a whole lot to repair the damage. 

Stain - I used this... 

I used two rags, one to put the stain on, one to take it back off (wax on, wax off...) and I coated the furniture completely. I did it one portion at a time though so that the color would be even and one part wouldn't be more stained than another. The stain wiped almost entirely off of the cream paint -  but it made the sanded edges and distressed areas in the wood stand out much more. Make sure you give those areas a chance to pick it up before wiping it away. 

The desk isn't entirely natural wood, there are portions of particle board so the sanding and staining process didn't work as well which was no big surprise. It still turned out nicely though. 

This is lots of fun, and is a great weekend project - I know I said you may have to let the paint set up for a few days but if you aren't dealing with super high humidity you should be able to do the whole process in a day. 

xo,

Rae