Furniture in Distress Part II – It’s DONE!!!

Wow! Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for all the comments you sent me! I’m so touched that you took the time to let me know how you liked it!

We finally finished our hutch and corner cabinet on Saturday, and I loooove it!

See the start of the project here.

Let me just say, distressing is harder than I would have imagined, especially if you don’t have a sander handy. I thought it would have been really easy, just sand at some furniture and DONE! What I didn’t factor into the equation was that for your first time trying your hand at it, distressing is kinda hard to wrap your mind around. If you’ve never tried it, let me explain.

Take an piece of furniture in need of some lovin. Prime, let dry, paint one coat, let dry, now paint two coats, let dry. Stand back and look at how AMAZING your furniture turned out! Wow, what an improvement! Now, take a razor or 5-in-one 14-in-one tool and beat that beauty up! WHAAAAAAAAAAT?!?!? I know. That’s what I was struggling with.

Once you accept the fact that a.) damaging paint and your furniture can be a good thing, b.) sandpaper won’t do ish if you don’t have a sander (use the above mentioned tools or get creative), c.) you can’t “do it wrong,” d.) it doesn’t have to be perfect, then you’re golden! I struggled with all of these and after about 15-30 minutes of scraping away, I got it and the process seemed to go much better and it really started to looked better. Just. Let. Go. And you’ll do great. 🙂

 

Some before and afters of my new favorite pieces of furniture:

 

the “before before” and the “one coat of paint before”:

 

after!

corner cabinet before:

and after!

 

Do you see me? I see me!  To re-cap, we primed using Kilz 2 primer (leftover from priming almost our whole house), painted 2 coats of Valspar’s Quail Egg ($22, used half), painted existing hinges and brass knobs from freecycle ($2, for half a can of Oil Rubbed Bronze), and distressed using a 14-in-one tool and razor blade for the small corners (had it). Although we haven’t applied glaze just yet, we bought Valspar’s Mocha Transulcent Glaze ($14 something), buuuuut found a brand new bottle of the SAME glaze at our local ReStore ($2, we’ll use maybe .25 worth). Scooore! I’m so returning the other glaze when I go to pick up more ORB!

Total cost: $13.25! 

We got the corner cabinet for $15 and the hutch from my Aunt Liat! The canisters were $15 for all from a garage sale and I was excited to see the word “IKEA” on the bottom. Sadly, they’ve been discontinued (sniff, sniff), so if you see something similar in a store or that you have, LET ME KNOW!! 

The pictures really don’t do it justice and I’ve had a hard time getting the lighting right in all of the pictures (sorry!).  Here’s a comparison of the wood, painted and distressed:

some close-ups:

     

The two pieces REALLY brighten up the room, it just transforms the space. Hopefully, I’ll be painting the table and chairs to unify them all, but we’ll see.

What do you think?