Annie Sloan’s Chalk Paint seems to be all the rage when upcycling a piece of furniture. The advantage it has over using emulsion paint is that no primer is required, even when painting over varnish. Hallelujah! You don’t even have to sand down your piece first. There are no harmful chemicals and you can just wash up your brushes in soap and water. (I don’t mind using oil based primer, but I do mind cleaning up, which is why I usually purchase really cheap brushes or rollers for the primer and then just chuck them out.) The chalk paint really does save a lot of hassle.
Before I purchased the paint, I read numerous blogs and watched countless videos on how to use the paint and the wax. Believe it or not, there is a method, which I will go through here. I want to thank all the bloggers in the blogosphere for all their tips. I have painted furniture before, but not with chalk paint. I think all the hype made it more complicated before I got started.
Here is what I was going to paint:
Before
Yup, my fireplace, something nice and small! This is an Edwardian fireplace mantle fitted over a post war (brown) tiled fireplace, in a Victorian house! I do not have the funds to replace this with what should really be here, so I am going to paint the mantle. This isn’t even a wonderful piece. Trust me, because I do love wood. The shelf and top are very thin and narrow. What it does have going for it is a mirror and some nice carved details that aren’t even noticeable with all of the brown stain. To take off the varnish would be smelly and a hassle.
I have striped curtains that look like this. I wanted to pick up some of the pink from the curtain and use it in the room.
I am sorry for the poor quality of the photos as the natural light was almost non-existent due to dull, rainy weather. This is with 2 coats of Scandinavian Pink. I used 1 part pink to 2 parts Old White which made Hydrangea. The first coat had a little bit of bleedthrough, so I applied some diluted paint for the second coat. Although it is a lovely pink, it is too much for the fireplace and is my basecoat or undercolour. I am not going to do a how-to or go into all the properties of the paint as so many others have done. It does stick to the varnish and dries quickly. I left this with 2 coats overnight. You can already notice the carving details just by using some paint. Also, the paint just made the fireplace recede into the room, rather than dominating it as it had done before.
Lesson one: A little paint goes a long way. I used half a cup of pink to one cup of white. I had some leftover and put it in a glass jar.
I applied a top coat of Old White, straight out of the can. To me, it looked a bit too yellow after it had dried. I wondered if it had something to do with the pink or maybe there was some bleed through from the varnish. So I put another coat of Old White on, a little diluted. There wasn’t much difference with the colour. I knew that Old White is not bright, but I didn’t expect it to be that creamy. It looks yellowish against the grey walls and white trim in my dining room, but much nicer than the brown!
I carried on and applied the wax, in natural. I am no stranger to wax. Less is more for wax. I just dipped or stabbed my wax brush into the pot and brushed the wax into the dried paint. I had a brush in one hand and a clean cloth for wiping excess wax in the other. Brush and wipe in sections. The wax gets tacky as it is drying. After applying a thin coat of wax, this is when you need to sand if you are going to do it. I needed to as I wanted to distress the finish and expose some of the pink underneath the white. When the wax is tacky, the paint balls up while being sanded and you have virtually no dust. Unfortunately for me, I needed to get through 2 layers of paint to expose the pink. The top coat sanded off with no dust, but not the first coat of white. There was a lot of dust! I had to get out my sander to expose the pink in some areas as the hand-held heavy grit paper wasn’t working so great.
Lesson 2: Less is more on the paint front if you are working with more than one colour.
After sanding the paint you get a really smooth finish. I vacuumed the dust and wiped the fireplace down with baby wipes (the cheapest) before putting on a final thin top coat of wax. I left that overnight and buffed with a dry cloth.
After
This looks so much better and makes the fire surround look more like a piece of furniture. You can really notice the carved details now. All I need is another hurricane lantern, to clean off the gunk on the tiles, and purchase a fire grate and it will be amazing. The fireplace works, so it would be lovely to have a fire while having dinner!
Here is another look of the before and after.
Before and After
Although I really like how it turned out, I am still not sure about the final colour. (I was orginally thinking about green, and will most likely use green for the dining room table.) However, it does look kind of beachy, and I do live beside the seaside!
I really did love the pink, so I made up some more, but diluted and painted the inside of the cabinet next to the fireplace. Unfortunately, once I put everything back inside (my art supplies!), you really couldn’t see much of the pink. The cabinet didn’t really look attractive with everything inside, so I put a panel behind the glass.
I do get to see the pink when I open the door!
The overall lesson when using the paint is that you don’t need too much. You don’t need too much paint. You don’t need too many coats of paint. You don’t need too much wax. Less is more.
Lesson 3: If you have to fill any crack with woodfiller or decorator’s caulk, sand it down and apply a thin coat of the wax on it before using the chalk paint. The chalk paint does not like filler and will not cover it.
I have some leftover pink paint that I made up and plan on painting the dining room chairs. Watch this space.
PS: Annie Sloan offer excellent customer service. Just thought I would mention it. 
