DIY Antiqued/Distressed Dining Room Table

Drum roll please......

WE FINALLY FINISHED OUR TABLE!!! 

The table before the refinish...

...and After!!!

We are quite proud of this beauty, it came out just as we wanted :) While I am not going to give you an awesome tutorial (pretty much because we had no idea what we were doing and made mistakes) I will give you some tips and tricks that we learned.

Our inspiration found on pinterest

It is difficult to tell from the pictures but we "distressed or anitqued" the legs of the table. Now we did not go as far as to take a hammer and dent up the legs, alot of tutorials do this. We just loved the table too much to damage the wood. I will get to how we did this step in a bit. 

Of course there was the wonderful task of sanding the stained table top. This you have to be very careful with, if you do not get every bit of stain and go through every layer your new stain will not adhere to the surface. This will leave you with dark stain in some places and none in others. This we had to learn the hard way. I have learned that using a dremel in the cracks and crevices is the best way to get the job done.  We used a hand sander and 150 grit sandpaper. Instead of sanding the table legs we decided to use primer. I think it took 3 coats to really cover the black legs. Then two coats of the tiffany blue color that we chose :) 

 After the blue color was completely dry we started "antiquing" I have to admit Calvin did this part. I was afraid to mess up all our work, plus I married a designer! He is so much better at this kind of stuff. To be honest you cannot really mess anything up, you can completely wipe off the acrylic if you don't like the look of it. We were going for a deep brown antiqued color, so by a little bit of black with the brown acrylic we were there. I am guessing that you can just purchase this dark brown if you wanted, but we were working with colors we had.

Now, how we did it was to pain on the acrylic in only certain places. Kind of rubbing it in as you go. You want it to sink into any cracks or crevices to get the awesome antiqued look.  

Your brush will probably be ruined, so make sure you use one you are ok with throwing away.

 

Now we used a thin piece of cotton fabric from an old shirt, it was a woven fabric (no stretch) and it was very thin. This worked great for us to wipe away the excess acrylic. Just dampen the cloth with a little water and ring it out and wipe away. If you wipe too much just add some more acrylic, let it dry and wipe again. 

 Once you have the look you desire just let it sit for at least 8 hours to make sure it is completely dry. Once it is dry to the touch and you have let it sit you can polyurethane the pieces, while this is not a fun step and it does stink quite a bit, it is a necessary one. I think we did two coats of polyurethane but I bet one would be just fine. Just make sure you read the directions and if you can paint it in a garage or a very well ventilated area (like a porch) please do! That is some stinky stuff!!

Calvin's finished antiquing work!