Distressed Painted Kitchen Table DIY
I'll admit it, I am all in on the modern farmhouse look. The style is beautiful, but man it is an expensive taste right now for my bank account. Thankfully, I have a partner who also loves creating and we had the tools to do it. If you also love the modern farmhouse look and creation, this post is definitely for you!
Through a lot of failure and research, we produced a product I love. Here it is!
We started by taking a table from the Facebook marketplace for $50. I could not find the exact table and we failed to take a before picture (if you know me, you aren't surprised), but this is as close as I could find to what the original looked like.
Read on to see our process and try it out yourself if you wish.
Remove laminate from the tabletop, here's what we did:
Unscrewed all of the legs from the table
Used a razor blade paint scraper to remove the laminate
Sanded the tabletop once all laminate was removed
Not gonna lie, the removing the laminate was VERY satisfying. Take a look for yourself:
After the sanding was complete, with extra caution on the thin chair legs, we dusted it off and coated everything in eggshell white primer (pictured below).
After the legs dried, we painted them over with our desired color. We chose a deeper gray color. The next step was the trickiest part: texturing the tabletop.
To texture the top, we tested a series of flooring tools with teeth, drywall knives with teeth, sponges, scrapers, etc. We found the best method is to use a mix of the ladder and have one person brush the paint on thick while the second person closely follows behind with the comb, scraper, or serrated knife of your choice to scrape away the paint and leave the white exposed underneath. It takes practice, it takes patience, but the result is a beautiful mock distressed wood look. Continue with this method until the whole tabletop is covered.
The final step is to seal all of the hard work you just did. DO. NOT. SKIP. THIS. STEP. Your paint will scrape easily with repeated use if you skip this step. Just don’t do it. To seal our table, we brushed on two coats of polyurethane, letting them completely dry in between.
Finally, assemble the table and reinforce it as necessary. Good luck!
