Kitchen Table Facelift

Just around the corner there is a little shop that nobody really notices even on quite a busy road. It's recently started selling painted furniture, handmade items and Annie Sloan's chalk paint (yay) so I popped along yesterday morning to pick up a few colours and get to work on giving that tired old kitchen table a facelift. If you've never used Annie Sloan's chalk paint, you should - it's a breeze. The 1 litre tin retails for £18.75 which is pricey but a tin did two coats on my table and chairs plus bulletin boards and a few patches on the wall. It's not chalkboard paint but it does have a matte chalky finish, is easy to distress and the best part? You can paint almost any surface (even fabric) and you don't need to prep at all! No sanding, no undercoat - literally, paint and finish with the wax.

In the first picture you can see I painted it fairly evenly by just slapping it on and then distressed it a little with some sandpaper to make it look a little less even and slightly older. You can also see in the background an unpainted chair which is the colour everything was before the paint. For the chairs I used one part Henrietta to four parts Pure to make this light pink colour and just popped it on the chairs quite thickly. Once dry I sanded the edges slightly and added a bit of almost dry white just here and there to rough the colour up a little more. I did all of this in my kitchen as it was raining (no odour from the paint so everything was great) but as you can see everyone had to work around me so it was a tight squeeze and ridiculously messy. The paint came straight off the tiled floor with a scourer and some warm water though and now everything is back in order and clean (thankfully).

The seats of the chairs are being reupholstered in a lace fabric possibly as early as tomorrow if I can find my staple gun so as soon as they're done I can show you the finished result. I'm not sure how the lace is going to work out or if I'll need to source more fabric next week but I'll no doubt post a little bit of a step by step tutorial on how to really quickly and simply reupholster a chair, if anyone is interested? If you're not, I'm still going to show you my finished chair. I'm no good at DIY usually so I'm really proud of how these turned out so you will look at the photos. My blog, my rules.

I've got to get this paint off my person so let me know what you think of the finished product!