Our schedules can be crazy with work, kids, day-to-day life and everything else that can go along with it. I wanted to bring some calmness into my house and thought this would be a furniture refinishing project inspiration to tackle. I found a nice little side table (used on Facebook Marketplace) that would work well in the space I had and started to prep it for colored gel stains.
Supplies:
- Sandpaper (fine and coarse grit)
- Unicorn Spit Gel Stains in blue and white (I created a third by mixing blue and white to make a light blue)
- White chalk paint
- Polycrylic water based sealer
- Medium chalk paint brush and small detail brush
Prep
First I went ahead and sanded the top of my table. I used a rotary sander to make this faster, but this can be done by hand. I wanted to remove the dark finish but was trying to be careful not to sand through the veneer (as you can see, I wasn’t always successful in keeping the veneer intact, but that didn’t hurt the final project).
Next, I taped off the beveled edge with painters tape since I didn’t want the stain to get on the edge.
Stain
After the edges were taped and the table was clean of any sawdust, I applied circles of stain on the sides alternating rows on the other side with the blue, light blue, and white stains. I spritz the table top with water to help with blending.
Then I swept my hand across in the direction of the grain in the veneer until I had pushed the stain from the center towards the center. I made sure to wipe my hand off between each swipe. Then I added more stain to bare spots in the color closest to the space and blended.
Paint
I painted the sides and legs with a white chalk paint using about 3 coats to cover the dark finish.
Sealing
I used Polycrylic which is a water based sealer. I have read that you should use a water based sealer with Unicorn Spit (since it is water based and can reactive the colors), but since I wanted the white to stay white and not yellow, I was just careful of the brush strokes.
Now I have my serene table 🙂
