Project of the Week

Deciding to limit myself on TV and browsing the internet has so far gone over very well. In my new found spare time I completed a project I've been thinking about doing for about a year now.

I picked up this little doozy from a dumpster last August (living in a college town, you can find some pretty decent stuff that college kids throw out when moving).

It's not the fanciest piece of work, but it's been a solid night stand for about a year now....and it was free!! I've been wanting to paint it up for awhile now. My thoughts were to paint it a nice cream color and try out the whole glazing technique I've seen all over the place. 

So I went out, bought my supplies and got everything ready to go! We don't have a sander, so I decided to try liquid deglosser. I thought this would be a good project to try it with before re-finishing anything else which has more nooks and cranies.

I didn't feel like the instructions on the bottle really told me what to do so I went to my trusty computer to find some tips. Everyone seemed to really love the stuff and were raving about how easy it was to use. I just didn't feel the same way about it. It seemed like a ton of work that I was putting the deglosser on and seemed like I was having to scrub to get the results (that I thought I was suppose to get). So, if any of you experts out there have advice, let me know! :)

What did I do? I went off and bought a orbital sander. There are plenty of other projects that I want to tackle, similar to this one, which would probably need a sander of this who deglossing thing wasn't going to work. I love the sander! All seems pretty simple to me (until I get to a piece of furniture that has grooves and I have to deal with hand sanding).

Next up was painting and glazing. I did two coats of paint and tested out the glazing on the little drawer. With this one I just painted the glaze on with a foam brush and wiped it round with a dry rag. I wasn't really diggin' it. To me, it just looked like a dirtied up drawer.

The second (middle drawer in the above picture), I followed steps that I found, brushing the glaze on and then wiping it off with a wet rag. This was suppose to leave glaze in the grooves...well whaddya know, there aren't really any grooves so, I was just wiping it all off. I tried to rub some glaze around the corners and on the handle, but there didn't seem to be much difference between that and the drawer with no glaze (on the left).

At the end of the night, I was frustrated and just started brushing the glaze on, pushing it around on the surface, and playing. Then I started liking what was happening. I asked Jesse what he liked best, and this is what we decided to go with.

Last night I went to town and finished the rest of the nightstand. Today we finally have dry finished product! :)

 

It looks absolutely nothing like what I had in mind (creamed colored antique type-looking thing), but we both really like how it turned out. It looks more grey than anything, but hey, we like grey! :)