How my mom turned a crappy old cabinet into a really awesome accent piece

My mom wrote up a description of the steps she took while distressing a beautiful cabinet that she gave me for my birthday, complete with in-progress pics. For those of you who are crafty, here it is for your enjoyment!

There are lots of posts and blogs on line that provide a way better description of how to paint/distress furniture, so I suggest you read them if you want some good information on how to do this properly — that’s what I did. But none of those blogs have what this description has, namely, that their furniture ends up decorating Rose’s cool apartment, and as regular readers of Rose’s blog know, Rose is awesomely cool!

The Before Photo

Before & After

First step was buying the buffet/hutch — the one I got was not exactly fine furniture, which made me feel bad because I was giving my daughter something slightly crappy for her birthday, but I told myself it was for the best, because I would also have felt bad painting over a wonderfully crafted piece of vintage or antique wood furniture, especially this being my first attempt and all. The before photo is from the usedvictoria ad, and is actually much nicer than this piece looked in real life — it had a lot of water damage and stains, also good for painting over.

primer and first coat

Next up, a coat of white primer that I had lying around — let it dry for a day and then started with the first coat of colour. Here’s where I made a mistake — I bought way too much paint. I don’t know what I was thinking, a litre would have been plenty, but I bought 4L, and with a striking colour like that, it’s not as if I can use it to paint a whole lot of furniture in my house — it’s more of an accent piece kind of colour. Speaking of, it’s called Spiro by General Paints. Rosemarie suggested the turquoise/teal colour and I agree, it’s beautiful and perfect for her place.

prior to sanding

I did 3 coats of colour since it’s so saturated, then let it dry for 3 days to be hard enough to sand. Just used some old sandpaper pieces that were lying around and sanded most of the corner/edges, as well as spots where there might likely be natural wear, plus any blems that were in the paint job (ahem, Stoic’s hair). Then I took some mahogany coloured gel stain we had lying around and rubbed it on with a cloth — here I made another mistake, I think I would use less next time, and I ignored the advice of the other bloggers and covered too much of an area at one time before proceeding to the next step — wiping it off with another old cloth, so the stain had already dried. This just happened on the underside of a shelf, which is where I started, so it’s not noticeable in the finished job.

Drying Sanded

Another day of drying, then I painted on some semi-gloss Varathane plastic coat we had from some other project. Again, I would do this slightly differently next time because I think I would prefer a more matt finish, so I would probably buy some matt finish Varathane, if there is such a thing, or use 3 coats of hand rubbed furniture wax, as recommended by bloggers, although that seems like an awful lot of work. I did a couple coats of finish on the work surface because it’ll probably get the most wear.

Another couple days of drying, and oh yeah, I forget the step where my husband helped me remove all the glass and hardware (just because he’s the tool guy and has the right screwdriver for all the different and weird screw types in this hutch/buffet — I did remove and replace a few bits of hardware myself!). So, hardware and glass was all put back in place, and we loaded it into the van ready to be taken to Rose’s apartment!