Distressing

I "jump on the bandwagon" a lot. I'm not ashamed to admit it. I need other people to tell me what's cool. So I have discovered distressed, vintage furniture and I love it. Let me clarify: I like a LITTLE distressing. I know lots of people who buy old junky furniture for super cheap and then fix it up all cute. I want to do that too! I painted my entertainment center and a side table once, they turned out fine, but I didn't do much distressing.

 Friday afternoon I drove by a used furniture store, decided to stop in, and found this little gem. I fell in love with it (mostly with the possibilities-in the words of my brother-in-law, Luke, I had on my "potential eyes.") It was priced at $30.00 and I was only able to talk the sales woman down to $25.00-I am bad at negotiating such things. Well, I brought it home and said to Cason, "You'll never believe what I bought!" (I'm sure he was thinking, "Isn't that the truth..") 

 Well, I was so excited to get started and bring my idea to life-I had to start that very minute! So I sanded it, taped it, primed it, and spray painted it Ivory. Well, I read in a magazine article that ammonia soaked on a dish rag, rubbed into the paint, will give a distressed look to furniture. But after a few minutes of that, with no visible results I got out the hand sander. I got some "cute" distressed edges, but I got some paint boogers, so I started to remove them with Goo-Be-Gone. (Heard of that stuff? When I was little I was sure it fixed everything.) Well... so my trouble began.

 If you thought this was a post teaching you how to distress furniture, you were wrong. The Goo-Be-Gone ate through my paint and then I had a shiny blue glow. And it was STICKY! STICKY EVERYWHERE! Long story short, the night involved all of the following, not necessarily in this order: a soak in Goo-Be-Gone, a soak in Ammonia, a scrub with Dawn dishwashing detergent, a bath in my bathtub (yes, the whole piece of furniture), blow drying, and scraping with a putty spatula. That picture above? That is the sticky blue mess I was scraping, scrubbing, and trying to remove from the ENTIRE piece. Cason came home and I was sitting on the living room floor working on it, and I was a wreck.  (Note: I had only recently moved my work to the living room, I was outside)

 Well, all of the blue sticky mess was able to be removed and I got some "cute" distressed marks.

 This white is what was under that blue mess.

Okay-so the point. I can't do everything I want to. I should leave some things to professionals. Like Hollie at http://www.vintagefarmfurniture.com/ I am lucky that this piece is not completely ruined after what it went through. It's going to go in my bedroom, but for now it is sitting on my dresser until Cason hangs it up for me.

Despite the fact that the process did not go how I planned, the piece did turn out almost exactly like I'd hoped! Funny. Kind of.

If I ever get the notion to try refinishing, restoring furniture, I will look back at this post and remind myself what a disaster this turned out to be.