Refinished Distressed Vanity

#distressedfurniture

Hello friends since we have bought a new home, I decided I want to redo all my bedroom furniture so I have started with this Vintage Waterfall Vanity, I love it, and I decided to refinish everything in this beautiful shade of purple. Here it is finished, isn't it just gorgeous? I made my own chalk paint for this, I give the recipe below.
Ever wanted to learn to distress furniture well here is my story of how I have done this piece and details how you can learn to do it too.

First of all pick a piece of furniture you want to distress, then you will need to sand it down, I do not care what some people say about using chalk paint, it still needs sanding to do a good job and for the paint to stick well. The thing I am learning about furniture is some is wood, some is laminate covered and some is veneer, this piece after I got to sanding I found out is laminate, so I researched laminate and after I got this piece wet, it bubbled, so I had to do something about that. I decided to remove the top layer of laminate and go from there.

see how it bubbled after I started working on it and I left it sit outdoors under the carport on a rainy night, my bad.

So I had choices, I could reglue it and hope it flattened out, or I could remove the bad parts and use some bondo to fill it in and support the wood underneath the laminate.

I went with removing the top laminate from the top of my vanity.

for this piece I just needed to remove all the top and the curve of the waterfall top

then I will need to bondo the top curve to reinforce the strength of the vanity

removing laminate takes some work and time, but well worth it on this beautiful vintage waterfall vanity

the secret is to get the laminate warm, I used an iron, and a wet cloth, steaming as I worked with a putty knife to loosen and remove the laminate.

It goes slowly so be prepared to take your time

top is free of the bubbles

here in the front on the curve is where I discovered it needed to be reinforced for strength

So I got a bondo fiberglass kit, just like you use on cars, wood, metal

Follow the directions of the bondo, it's really pretty easy

After that dries then I went over the bondo with a filler to fill in the fiberglass.

Let that all dry, next day it is ready to lightly sand smooth.

Once all the bondo, filler and some light sanding was done.

It was paint time

I make my own chalk paint 

Here is my recipe

1/3 cup plaster of paris

1/3 cup of warm water

mix this till smooth and all the lumps are gone

then add 1 cup of your good brand of paint you want to use in the color you want.

Stir this up I use a plastic ice cream container to mix the paint

I use 2-3 coats of chalk paint

Let it dry well.

Once the base coat of color is dry, I then took a white for the distressing top coat

You can use chalk paint for this or not, since I thought it was not necessary I used the paint without adding my chalk mix

Let this dry, then you will want to lightly sand off some of the white paint

You may even want to sand to let a touch of the real wood show through, I did just a little.

You want to use a finer grade of sandpaper for this I used a 400 grit

Here it is getting just how I want it, letting the purple show through with that distressed "aged" look I was going for. For the white, I use a very dry bush which means you dip your brush in the paint barely then you wipe off the excess paint, use a rag, or paper towels to get the paint off, or wipe it on a styrofoam plate, I put just a little white paint on my styrofoam plate, then barely dip the brush in the edge of the paint and wipe off.

I also painted the original handles black metal, with purple inserts, these look really cool

here is what they looked like originally

I like the finished ones much better, see the first picture above.

Then because we had gotten rid of the original large mirror, which I may find another larger one at a later time, I can't decide yet. I painted this mirror to match.

After all was done I coated everything in 2-3 coats of polyacrylic, it does not yellow like other brands, costs a little more than some but it's good. It cleans up with water and it comes in a variety of finishes, I used a low sheen, semi matte finish.

I have the stool to redo next. more on that when I get it done.

THANKS FOR READING

I hope I help some of you to take on some furniture refinishing