Tutorial for refinishing wood furniture to look distressed and aged...

Well, I'm still dragging from the flu, but I managed to get the small bench for the bathroom redo, redone...

Truly, I thought it would be so, so easy, but... <sigh>

The end result is awesome, but the getting there was well, a pain in the rear and took me all day~!

You know how it is when you think you just have a painted piece of furniture you're going to redo and then you dig into it and realize the person that played with it before you made a horrible boo-boo...

The boo-boo on this little $2 bench was that they painted over a high gloss surface ~ yikes!

Yep ~ Big Mess...!

To read the rest of the story & tutorial, click "Read More"...

Nobody wants to layer on top of a 'big-mess,' so getting as close to the original wood and below the paint and high gloss can be a nightmare...

So, here it is before - just gleaming in a shade of some kind of carribean blue. I'm assuming the color is why it was marked so low at $2. It's almost a 'smurf' neon blue color...

But, this little bench is SOLID and was well worth the two dollars even sporting the crazy blue color. And since I'm one of those women that have to sit down to put on mascara, this little sweetie is a perfect bench for the bathroom and fits right under the window...

I started out by trying to sand the paint off - this is how I realized that the underneath was high gloss ~ Oh joy...

So, I took it into the kitchen and got out a thick, steel, putty knife and started scraping... I learned a secret many, many, moons ago about paint on a high gloss surface. If you use a really wet rag and soak it down and let it sit for a couple minutes, it scrapes right off as if you used paint stripper...

See the high varnished surface under the paint showing through...

See... High Gloss, painted surface = disaster later if left un fixed.

I've dealt with a few similar projects llike this over the years and I've learned to identify a high gloss surface under paint as soon as I start sanding...

Now, we sand... and sand... and sand... and sand with a palm sander... oh boy...

The paint on the center support of this little treasure would not sand off (a piece of unfinished pine), so I just decided to work with it - use it to my advantage in future steps...

Before I was done sanding, I attacked this piece with a horse shoe rasp, an old key, and a couple different size nails to really distress the edges and top surface. I wanted it to look old, instead of like a repurposed bench from an 80's piece of high gloss furniture. It was probably originally a bed rail, I suspect...

When I finished sanding and for a layer of added roughness on that shellacked surface, to make sure it was fully prepped for new paint, I used some 'de glosser' and saturated the whole piece well...

Then, I started layering on different colors of blue with a stiff 'chip brush'...

I used 5 different shades that were close to my vintage bathroom tub color of blue.

Just slap it on there, it doesn't need to be any kind of perfect, it just needs to be layered...

I used my darkest shade of blue paint as the bottom layer. Then, I added the other colors of blue from dark to lightest on top of each other...

I waited a couple hours for it to dry well and took out and sanded it to distress it...

You want to get all the way down to the bare wood in places so in the next step, the stain will soak in the wood. You want to 'blend' the layers and show all the different layers of color by sanding different colors off in different places...

When you have it distressed as much as you want it, now comes the fun part~!

I don't have pics, because I WAS COVERED in it, but I use minwax stain and cover the whole piece and wipe it off with a rag. Like glazing a piece, only I use stain and stain is thin and MESSY~!

For this piece, I used Minwax Jacobean colored stain.

The finished look is AWESOME...

This is one of the many ways I 'antique' a piece of furniture to give it age...

End result = FABULOUS OLD FINISH~!!!

I managed to get the 'soon-to-be' bathroom towel cabinet sanded and ready to start the same paint layering and antiquing process tomorrow. I think it will be even prettier when it's finsihed ~  So, stay tuned...