DIY Weathered Wood Finish

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We un-did the re-do!

The ‘Great Armoire Redo Disaster Saga’ is finally over!

If you’ve been following along here for a while, you know that I tried to makeover my large rustic pine armoire because I didn’t like how orange it was

This is the way it looked for 30 years. — This is the way it’s looked for 30 years.

But everything I tried was a disaster…

There was the first episode which was my attempt to whitewash it with chalk paint added to finish wax

Not quite the look I was going for…

So then I went over that with more wax mixed with a greenish gray chalk paint

This was closer to what I wanted but it came out really pink. Which is weird because the green in the paint should have cancelled out the red on the armoire…

So then I decided to paint the whole thing white to get rid of the pink. Then I went over that with a dark wax

And I ended up with this hot mess

Well at least the pink was gone…

Here’s another shot of it after we had already stripped everything off of the left door

After all that trial and error (mostly error!!), we were going to have to get it down to the bare wood so we could start from scratch to refinish it.

Now I say ‘we’ because Mr. Redoux helped me strip it. Let it be said that, while he had absolutely nothing to do with my process of layering disaster over disaster upon this poor unsuspecting armoire other than shaking his head every time he walked by the room, he was a really good sport about helping me undo all the damage!

First we stripped off all those layers of paint and wax.

My recommendation would be for you to do your research and decide on a stripping product/method that you feel would work best for you. Make sure to strictly follow the instructions on the label.

After we stripped it, we sanded as much of the color off as we could.

Now we have everything stripped and sanded

But we can see that there’s still a lot of the original red paint in the grain

So we bleached the wood.

My recommendation would be to do your research and decide on a bleach product that you feel would be safe to use and strictly follow the label instructions.

After we bleached ours, it lightened the wood and it lightened the paint pigment a little but not enough to take the red out

So I talked to my Zen self and decided to

Embrace

The

Red

Now hang in there with me — we’re almost done, I promise…

This is the good part where the magic happens —

We applied Minwax Wood Effects accelerator wood aging stain

This stuff is pretty amazing!

After you put it on, it instantly starts to make the wood look gray

Like it’s been out in the weather for years

And it continues to darken a little more over time unless you put a finish over it

We let ours sit for about 5 days and this is the color we ended up with

Very ‘Restoration Hardware’ looking don’t you think?

There is a learning curve to applying this stain

It’s not really like regular stain. It’s really thin — like water. And it starts to work as soon as it hits the wood. You need to brush it on evenly with the grain. Don’t let it pool or run. We had to work really fast to get it on evenly

When we were happy with the color we just went over the whole piece with a coat of Minwax Paste Finishing Wax in Natural which didn’t add any additional color

So we went from this