More Adventures with Chalk Paint: Dresser Makeover

It’s been on my to-do list for more than two years now and it feels so great to say that I’ve FINALLY painted our little antique dresser!!!

I introduced you to this beauty a few weeks ago when I wrote about my maiden voyage with Annie Sloan Chalk Paint HERE. I fell in love with it when we were shopping for Baby Mercer’s nursery (*note that Baby Mercer is now almost two years old and goes by Carson). I knew right from the beginning that I would paint it white, yet I still wanted to find a way to keep the character (read: cigarette burns) in that gorgeous wood top. I chose to paint the base with Annie Sloan’s Chalk Paint in Old White and just a quick coat of wax over the dresser top and drawer knobs definitely brought some life back to the stained wood. I absolutely LOVE how it turned out – the cream colour sets off the beautiful wood tones just right!

I am really am beyond thrilled with how it turned out!!! So thrilled in fact, that I hate to put it back into our super boring guest room, which is definitely in need of a makeover itself. Although I am tempted to overhaul the entire room tonight, I promised ~~Brady~~ myself that I would focus on one room makeover at a time. So it seems that since I’ve already committed to making a room for Carson (you can check out what we’re planning HERE), my dreams of a luxurious guest room will have to wait. I suppose that’s really okay because, if I’m being honest, I have absolutely no clue what I want to do with it yet anyway.

Instead staying up all night redecorating our guest room, I found a few more things to paint to tide me over:

I think these empty antique frames will look lovely grouped on the wall over the dresser (just as soon as I choose a spot for it).

Have you taken the Chalk Painting plunge yet?

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Experimenting with Chalk Paint

Finally getting those shelves up last weekend has totally inspired me to tackle some other projects that I’ve been meaning to do for what feels like an eternity. Here’s what I was up to today…

Like so many others, I’ve fallen in love with that country-chic look of a painted piece of antique furniture. Not just any old panted piece of furniture will do though, I tend to gravitate toward furniture with the more rustic look of distressed chalk paint. I really do love the idea of transforming something old and worn out into a swoon-worthy piece that can bring some personality, colour and texture to a room.

I convinced Brady to purchase this dresser from an antique store in town for our nursery when I was pregnant. It was a beautiful piece with a ton of potential … though the drawers and pulls looked like they had seen better days, I couldn’t get enough of the rustic wood top. Even before we took it home, I had a very clear picture of how I would transform this dresser. Two years later our son has a new dresser and that beautiful antique has been tucked away in our guest room, buried under all sorts of random stuff (everyone has some spot in their home that just seems to collect random things, don’t they?). It’s really is such a shame to see it so under-appreciated, especially when all I can see is the amazing potential it has to add to our home.

Although I am crazy eager to get working on this piece and find a new home for it in our master bedroom, I’m pretty new to the world of chalk paint (and all things DIY really) and I really don’t want to screw this up. Enter another project I’ve been meaning to do since the days of shopping for the nursery: this little bedside table would be a perfect practice piece for me. Before Carson was born, I ordered this table on Amazon for the nursery and, though I’ve always liked the vintage style details, I’ve never really liked the bright white colour (a hazard of shopping online I suppose). Painting this will not only give me a chance to learn the chalk painting ropes, but it would be a fun way to add some colour to our very bland guest room.

So, here we go …

I started by removing the crystal knob and wiping down the table with a clean cloth. Then I was ready to paint! Seriously, because I was using chalk paint, there was absolutely no other prep involved (believe me, I triple checked!). I chose to use this Annie Sloan Chalk Paint in Provence.

The paint is thick and everything I had read said that I would likely only need one coat, but I really wasn’t happy with the brush strokes and all the white that showed through after the first coat.

So, I painted a second and it looked SO much better!

Chalk paint dries incredibly fast, but I wanted to give this second coat a couple of hours to really set before I distressed it. Distressing chalk paint is incredibly easy – all it took was a few soft swipes with some sandpaper. It’s important to use extra-fine sandpaper (I used 120 grit) as it doesn’t take much to dig through the paint. If you do take a bit too much off, just go back over it with some paint – it’s really no big deal.

After distressing, I applied a thing coat of Annie Sloan Clear Wax. In my research, this seemed to be the trickiest part – because it changes the colour of the paint slightly as it soaks in, it can be difficult to keep an even look. In an effort to keep things as simple as possible, I used a rag to apply really small amounts of wax and worked hard to rub every bit of it in. I had a tough time getting a good picture of it, but here is a shot of the top of the table as I applied the wax.

And here it is! Taking all of these pictures in different areas (my shop, garage & guest bedroom) ended up altering the colour portrayal a bit, but this last one was the truest.

I was really surprised at how easy and almost fool-proof my first experience with chalk painting furniture was. I honestly can’t believe it was so easy – it turned out exactly as I had hoped! I cannot wait to transform that beautiful dresser for our master bedroom!!!

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DIY Pottery Barn Picture Ledge Shelves

Happy Monday!!! Somehow the weekend came and went in the blink of an eye. We had a super busy Saturday shopping in Spokane, so the only useful thing we tackled on Sunday was to get those shelves up on the wall. I am SO excited to FINALLY share this post after so many weeks of talking about it!

Since turning our wedding collage picture frame into a giant bulletin board (see picture below), I needed a new way to display some of our pictures. I bought some barn wood frames a while ago to put the pictures into, but since I wasn’t really sure where to hang them, they’ve sat stacked in the corner of our guest room for months now just waiting to be used. When I came across this post by Shanty-2-Chic, I knew that some picture ledge shelves would be the perfect way to display our beautiful photos and frames.

*My DIY Bulletin Board.

Here’s what you’ll need for each shelf to make your own:

2-1x4s cut to length
1-1×2 cut to length
some screws (I used #6 x 2″ wood screws to put together the shelves and 2″ drywall screws to attach it to the wall)
some finishing nails
wood glue

I had Brady cut our wood to 3′ lengths and then I stained each piece with Minwax wood stain in Dark Walnut.

*Note: The 1x6s shown in this photo were used to make this DIY Art Display Hanger.

To attach our 1x4s together, I added a line of glue to bottom edge of one board and then pre-drilled through the back and screwed them together.

To attach the 1×2, I simply ran a line of glue along the bottom 1×4 (not the the back piece with the screws) and attached the 1×2 with some finishing nails. That’s it … easy peasy!

Although my original intention was to leave the beautiful walnut stained wood exposed, in the end, I chose to apply a coat of Annie Sloan Chalk Paint in Old White over top of the stain because (1) I didn’t like the way the colour turned out on the 1x2s and (2) I thought the white colour would contrast more with my barn wood frames. I’ve only just begun experimenting with Chalk Paint, but I’m in love with it already!!! It’s so easy to see why it’s become so popular … you don’t need to prepare the surface at all (though if you have raw, unfinished wood, you’ll need to shellac or stain it first), you can paint ANYTHING, it dries quickly, distresses easily and just a little paint goes such a long way.

Here’s what the shelves looked like after the first coat of chalk paint.

And after the second coat.

I also chose to sand it down a bit to give it more of a distressed, rustic look. I absolutely love the way the dark stain shows through!

To hang these babies on the wall, I screwed a couple of 2″ drywall screws through the shelves into the wall studs. It didn’t really matter to me that the screws into the wall were visible because they would be covered with pictures anyway, but you could always nail some art hooks onto the back if you didn’t want them to be visible.