How do I give my unfinished chairs a distressed look?
Monday, September 14th, 2009 at
7:31 pm
I have found the perfect unfinished dining chairs. I want to paint them black. How do I give them that distressed look?
Tagged with: dining chairs
Filed under: Your Community Center
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let my kids use them for a month.
A lot of people use heavy duty chain to get the distressed look by hitting the chair with the chain in a random fashion. If you don’t want the dents or gouges then there are techniques for making furniture look old as well as the paint. Talk to the paint manager at your local home improvement store. There is a lot on line too. Here is a link I just pulled up.
http://www.repair-home.com/how_to_distress_wood.html
hope this helps
From the internet:
Here is the easiest way in the world… 1. Distress the finish – a few nicks with a hammer. a few small nail holes (looks like old worm holes) and so on. Some poeple use a chain and hit the surface. 2. Paint the light base coat in off white, cream, what ever color you want (but lighter) paint leaving brush strokes, (strokes should mimic the wood grain). 3. When dry, take a wood stain in a soft brown, or a brown paint (thined with water or a thinning compound) and rub it over the surface with a balled up rag. Rub extra where the natural stains would be darker, like near the edges, where dust would be harder to clean… Do it lightly and add more coats to get the right look. I have used this technique many times, and you can’t mess up. It’s so easy. The stain fills in the brush strokes, and darkens inside the dents and dings. It’s a great effect. If it’s a big surface, you can brush on the stain and rub it off as well.
Depends how distressed you want.
I use a bag containing the contents of my "odd screw drawer" – where all the mixed fixings go. Just bag up various sizes of nails, bolts, nuts, fixings -and whack them around the areas you’d expect heavy use – legs – edges and scratches on flat areas (not too much of this).
Then paint – but sand off rubbed areas back to the original wood. Then topcoat to seal it like that with a antique woodstain.
Try various effects on scrapwood to start.
Take a length of of heavy chair (like the sort one would use on a boat anchor) about 12 to 16" long. Hold one end in your right hand, and one in your left. Now start spinning/whirling it like a jump rope, taking care not to hit yourself in the face. Now, with the chain whirling, let the center part of the chain hit the surface you are trying to distress. Soft wood (like pine or cedar) will distress more easily than hard wood (like oak or maple). Work the entire surface of the chair over with the chain like this, and you will have one distressed chair.
Now you can paint it and the dents will stand out.