Talking Furniture

The buffet project that was supposed to take a day and took three weeks. More on that tomorrow.

It's come to my attention that people apparently trust my opinion when it comes to painting furniture. I am not sure why. Probably because I've painted so much crap and done it badly (our living room tables are on their 5th? 6th? coat of paint) and after that much trial and error, I've gained some degree of credibility. I've painted everything from curbside furniture to wood floors. My MO for the first few years we were married was dragging stuff home from curbs because "I can paint this and make it cute!" I've since given that up, (some stuff is just more work than it's worth) but I have the chevron-painted table to prove I probably know more than the teenager working in the paint department at Lowe's.

Here are my best tips...


Black paint can be your best friend. It can also be your worst enemy.

With all that crazy mismatched dumpster furniture, my (pretty brilliant) idea was to paint it black to create the illusion it matched. I wasn't too far off with this one, and would still encourage it if you find yourself in a post-college apartment on a tiny budget. Or wanting to freshen up a room by throwing in a sassy-black end table.

Pros? When stuff gets scratched, just throw on another coat of black paint. This worked for me for YEARS. Black will cover anything and everything in 1-2 coats.

Cons? Dust shows immediately after dusting. I'm talking, IMMEDIATELY. And black will make even the brightest rooms appear dark and heavy.

I still have a secret love for the eight-year-old, partial-gallon of black-high-gloss paint in our basement and might even pull it out again someday...

This dresser was a hand-me-down I was given in college and is losing it's laminate finish on one side...but if this coat of flat paint, new hardware, and a little distressing didn't bring it back to life...holy smokes.

FLAT PAINT IS THE BEST PAINT.

I stumbled upon this tip by sheer happenstance a year ago. I found a quart of $3 paint in the mis-tint section at Lowe's and bought it because...it was a can of $3 gray paint. The options are endless, people. What followed was a serious change in the way I paint furniture.

For years I was all about using 'high or semi-gloss' paints...something I believe I picked up from childhood about glossy kitchen walls being 'easier to wipe off'...which can be accurate. But who wants to be able to see their reflection in their yellow kitchen walls? I digress...I had taken to painting furniture with glossy paint (the easy to wipe rule applied, right?!) and found that no matter HOW MANY HOURS I let it dry in between coats or how low the humidity was, it was. always. sticky. Forever. Flat paint? Dries in like five minutes and is never sticky. Dresser drawers don't stick! Pictures frames on shelves don't stick! It's truly amazing! And the project turnaround time can't be beat.

I've used that quart of mis-tint paint for everything from painting the kick-plate under our kitchen cupboards, to the inside of my antique Galena cupboard, to the hand-me-down dresser in our bedroom. I will cry when it's gone.


Spray paint vs. brushed paint.

I like different things about both...these are my general rules:

• If it will take less than four cans, it's usually easier to spray paint.
• If it has turned legs, it's always easier to spray paint.
• If there are any intricate details, spray paint.
• Wherever the perfect color/finish exists, go that route.
• If it's a huge/heavy furniture piece that isn't easy to haul out to the garage and back in by yourself because your husband won't help because he's busy and also thinks its stupid to paint a perfectly-fine piece of furniture another color when two years ago you wanted it to be the color it currently is...it might just be best to put some cardboard underneath and brush-paint it inside the house, right where it is.

I tend to brush paint simple, flat, shelves and dressers to avoid uneven-ness and dripping that spray paint can sometimes cause...but I spray painted a small-ish black bookshelf creamy white and it turned out really well. When I was finally ready to refinish our buffet, I chose a high-quality, flat, creamy-white spray for the bottom due to the intricate legs and door details and it worked wonderfully. I stained the top, but I'll explain that a little later....

A shot of our $10, previously yellow, turned black, turned white, garage sale end tables. It's truly amazing what paint and new hardware can do. These are chalk painted and while they look good from far away and through an Instagram filter...they haven't held up well.

Chalk paint is not worth the hype, in my humble opinion.

Maybe it's because I painted our living room furniture while I was eight months pregnant. Maybe it's because my first (and only up to this point) chalk painting project included tiny paint-brushing 12 turned legs. Or maybe it's because I was covering all of our BLACK furniture with WHITE chalk paint, resulting in no less than five coats when it was all said and done. Whatever the reason...I just don't love it. The whole process is more work than it's worth, and honestly, it hasn't even been two years and our living room tables are in desperate need of a heavy touch-up. It's kind of expensive if the project is big (I can't IMAGINE doing a dresser or cupboards) so I give it a C-, and that's being nice.

Painting with color is not always a good idea.

Oh guys. If you know me, you know I once had a red kitchen, a purple dining room, a lime green living room wall, a pink laundry room, and a turquoise bedroom ALL AT THE SAME TIME. WHYYYYYYYY didn't Jesus just take the wheel and stop me before I painted all 1,200 square feet of our house with that much color?!?!

I cannot even. Some days I want to punch 21-newlywed Mollie in the face, mainly for all the work she caused Future Mollie by painting the hallway closet 'Jalapeno Jelly' LIME GREEN.

This is what I am saying to you. Think about it for a looooooong time before you pick up that paint brush with red on the end because, "Everyone has a red kitchen! I want one too!" Collect samples, pin stuff to a fresh board on Pinterest, look at the latest Magnolia magazine, ask me for my opinion, then and ONLY THEN are you allowed to paint something an obnoxious color. I thought about my pink door for a full year before I actually did it. And I still love it! I'm about 80% sure I'm going to spray paint the base of my kitchen island vintage turquoise, but I need a little more time before I'm ready to commit. I learned all of this the hard way and made WAY more work for myself. Please, for the love, don't make the same mistakes I did.

On the flip side...don't be too scared of color either. Paint can always be changed and sometimes obsessing about it for a year isn't the best idea. A few years ago I woke up with nothing to do on a Saturday morning and decided I couldn't live with a red kitchen for another minute. By the end of the day I had a neutral, cool gray kitchen. It's the room that started the neutral transformation throughout the rest of our house! Quick decisions aren't always bad.

I'm a big fan of mixing paint and stain on a single piece of furniture. It breaks up the color and I always think stain holds up better on high-traffic surfaces than paint does. So I keep a little can of walnut-colored stain on hand to work on projects here and there.

Don't forget about wood stain!

I didn't discover the beauty of wood stain until a few years ago when we took on staining our cupboards...you can read about that insane project here. When we moved in I had dreams of painting our cupboards white (SO GLAD I took three years to think about it!), but realized stain is much more durable, thinner (three layers of paint adds some thickness to cupboards...which can make it hard to get them to lay and meet and hang like they did before painting them), and richer. People are always asking about our cupboards, which is such a shock to me because they're just ugly 50's cupboards with two cans of stain and fresh hardware (and also two weeks of hard work and one crying episode from yours truly).


I'll rapid-fire a few final thoughts:

• Learning how to free-hand trim is one of the best and most useful life skills I've learned
• Rollers are disposable, don't waste your time rinsing them out
• Oil-base painting is sometimes a necessary evil...our plastic kitchen 'backsplash' has held up super well!
• Satin poly can seal and save almost anything (ie: the farm door in our living room, metal ceiling plate hanging our wall)
• If it's not oil-base, painting while pregnant in a well-ventilated space is really no big deal
• Using sand paper to 'rough up' a painted furniture piece is the perfect way to get the farmhouse look but start off slow...less is usually more
• Sometimes old furniture is amazing and worth every bit of the hard work...but sometimes, it's better to just go to IKEA for a new dresser
• Stuff will almost always cost more and take longer than you think...be prepared for that
• We still have one of our very first 'dumpster finds' living in our house but I'm going to make you guess what it is................. ;)

If you have questions about something I shared, just text me. Seriously...I love spending naptime texting friends about paint samples and furniture arrangements. 

MmB