Domesticated Bliss

4 steps to Family Table Painting Success!

-1- Sand all shiny off! Strip with dangerous chemicals, inside your kitchen, while kids are sleeping, to remove remainder of shiny. Scrape, sand, dispose of chemicals properly. Some stain may remain.

post stripping picture



 

 

-2-Mix 2 parts gray paint with 1 part water and plaster of paris.

• Mix well. 
• Paint mixture will be very watery and will over stained table well. ( I don't do well with instructions or measurements, so don't actually believe what I wrote. I'm assuming I just followed the Pinterest instructions) 
• The plaster of Paris will leave sand particles on the table. I lightly sanded them off or even just wiped the specks and sand bumps off with a rag once the paint dried.
•  It took less than 30 minutes for paint to dry.

-3- I than took a black paint mixed with 1 part glaze ( very little is needed for this project) and wiped it over the table following the grain of the wood. The paint seeped into the cracks and I wiped the remainder of  the paint off. Essentially you are rubbing the paint into the wood grain to give the flat table color some definition. *** The table looked too dark so I did the same process again using the gray paint to lighten the color a bit. I wanted the table to look more gray than dark.

You can see my wipe strokes. To avoid this move your rag the complete width of  the table

-4-The last step I used soft wax 48 hours after the paint dried.

•  I used a Minwax soft wax (looks like Crisco, don't  taste it) to make the table kid durable. It is not recommended to polyurethane a kitchen table. So, for once, I listened. 
• I buffed the soft wax over the top and the sides as well as the flat surfaces ( I took the lazy route).
• It literally was wax on, wax off.

**It has been one full year since I painted this table. It will need to be repainted perhaps next year. But I have been happy with the longevity of the new color. Besides the waxing, I was done with this paint project in one full nap time (under 2 hours)
*** Considering I have 4 kids,  and the wear and tear of this table has endured, the paint has lasted. There are some spots where you can see the original color of the table, but nothing noticeable at first glance.