The chair: Part 5

I had researched a few techniques for how to paint over the gold paint and have it show through with a "distressed" look and my goal was to have something like this:

After poking around the internet seemed to favor Annie Sloan chalk paint... which sells for L18.19 per liter. Yikes. So I found a blogger or two who said they recreated the paint by buying standard house paint and mixing in Plaster of Paris. After seeing their success I tried it out myself by mixing 2 Cups Paint (matte),1/3 Cup Plaster of Paris, and 2 Tbsp Water.

I was nervous but I jumped right in. I mixed up my plaster and paint and slapped it on without being too careful to cover everything perfectly. I kind of hovered it over it as it dried then tried to wipe some off. Unfortunately for me it wasn't dry enough yet and I just smeared paint everywhere. Lame.

test chair leg, post paint application / pre sanding.

So I added some more paint on top of the mess I made to get an even coating and let it dry a bit longer. This time when I went to wipe some off it was totally dry. Oops! So I busted out some sand paper and went at it. I was nervous that I'd sand through the white paint and the gold paint, but it worked perfectly.

Thinking that I'd better work quickly before I figured out a new way to screw the paint up I finished the rest of the chair's base with this technique.

When this dried I flipped the chair over and did exactly the same thing to the top half: slap on some paint, let it dry, then sand it off on the areas that would normally get wear.

Once all the paint dried I tried to seal it all up by rubbing in some clear furniture wax. I read that this would make your paint more scratch resistant, so I was down because I hate using poly (it's annoying to apply and it stinks). The wax may not have been that much easier in the end because it took some serious elbow grease to get in all those nooks and crannys. (I don't have a picture for this step but it looks exactly the same as the picture above).

I have to say, I've moved the chair a few times since I applied the wax and... I don't think it helps at all. The paint scratches and transfers to other things (corners, other furniture) really easily if you bump it while moving. I don't particularly mind for the chair's sake (it make's the sanding more "authentic"!) but I don't love scratching off all the transferred paint with my fingernails. My manicures don't like it either. I'm still not going to poly it, though, because the chair has since found its resting place, so movement isn't really an issue anymore, and I still hate poly. So there.