I don’t know about you, but I love a good (and inexpensive) refresh! If you’ve been following me on Insta, then you may notice that I have changed (yet again) our bed in our master bedroom.
I recently refinished our nightstand (I’ll post about that DIY soon, so stay tuned!) and I eventually want to refinish all of our bedroom furniture to match it.
So here was the original plan…move our bedframe into the guest bedroom and replace it with a new bed that would go with our newly refreshed nightstand. I found a great deal on a beautifully upholstered bed that I loved from Amazon. I was so excited to get it and put it all put together, and I was feeling super proud of the deal I found…until it was done 😢
Against our light blue walls (Silver Strand by Sherwin Williams to be exact) the neutral linen material of the bed suddenly looked a little yellow and was not at all what I was expecting… whomp whomp. But, being the stubborn me that I am, I would not be defeated!
After a lot of Pinterest scouring, I decided to go ahead and refinish our old bed and keep it in our room until I could find a replacement for the yellow-toned upholstered situation that was currently crushing my hopes and dreams.
Since I loved how the nightstand turned out, I decided I was going to tackle this beast of a bed and sand it down to its natural wood finish. How hard could it be, right? I mean, the nightstand was tough, but it had a lot of rounded pieces that are hard to get to with the palm sander. This bed is all straight lines, so it would be a cakewalk in comparison! Um… not so much.
I was sanding away and had about 80 percent of that puppy done…until I got to all the detailed molding. Palm sanders are small, but they don’t fit into detailed molding as easily as they did in my mind when I had planned this all out. Not to mention that if you want to sand through the dark honey orange stain and clear coat nightmare that this bed had on it, you’ve got to use about 4,500 pieces of sandpaper to get down to natural wood. Oh.Muh.Goodness. Why am I doing this again?!
Now, for those of you thinking, “Why didn’t you use a chemical paint/stain stripper?”, the answer is simple; I have no patience. Plain and simple. I am impatient and want instant results. I love that when I’m sanding I can almost immediately see results and I don’t have to mess with the gunky stripper getting all gummed up, and then trying to get every last bit of it out of the creases in the furniture. I did use CitriStrip on the nightstand and realized that I didn’t love it, so, I may use CitriStrip again on future DIYs, but I was ready to be done with this bed and move on.
So here I was, 452,000 pieces of sandpaper later, and my bed was not done. Did I mention that I’m impatient? It was time for another plan of action.
I have seen and done a lot of different faux finishes before, but I wanted that Restoration Hardware/Pottery Barn look that I drool over. So, here’s what I did to achieve it!
I went to my local hardware store and bought this chalk paint and had it tinted in the color, Agreeable Gray. I also bought this paint to use as a gray wash (I’ll explain shortly) and had it tinted in the color, Dovetail. Although I had already sanded all of the clear coat finish off of the bed, I didn’t need to do any of that! If you use chalk paint, you don’t need to waste time sanding – it doesn’t require any prep! So, I painted the bed and let it dry for a good hour or so. Chalk paint dries very quickly which is perfect for little impatient ol’ me!
Now about that gray wash I mentioned…this is the easiest paint job on the planet! You just mix a 50/50 ratio of paint and water (half paint/half water) and apply it like you would a stain. There’s no wrong or right way to do this part. I just used my round-tipped brush and applied it a little at a time, and while it was still wet I used a damp sponge to wipe it off. The key is to keep working it while the gray wash is still wet, and you can get it as light or as dark as you want it. To darken it, just keep layering it, or you can make the ratio more paint and less water so it’s a little thicker.
I like the look of the wood grain texture, so I made sure to use straight linear strokes with the brush and the sponge to keep the lines going with the grain of the wood. If you mess up, just wipe with a wet rag or sand lightly and start over. If the gray wash is wet enough when you apply it, then the direction of the strokes won’t matter as much. You start to see the streaks as it dries in place, so the key is to keep a wet edge until you get the look and texture you want.
What I love about this project is that the imperfections are what make it so beautiful! The subtle changes in texture and shade really give it a more expensive look than if I just painted it a solid gray.
When the gray wash was all dry (I let it dry overnight) I went over the whole bed with this polycrylic flat finish topcoat, so it wouldn’t look shiny and wouldn’t change the shade of gray that I worked so hard to achieve. Using a polycrylic is important because it won’t turn yellow over time as regular polyurethane sealers will. It’s also water-based, so it cleans up easily with soap and water!
I am obsessed with how it turned out! Isn’t it a scroll stopper?! I can’t stop staring at it 😍😍😍 You can see a little glimpse of my DIY nightstand in some of these shots, and although I don’t really love how they look together, I’m pretty proud of how they both turned out. Now I just have to decide which one will go in the guest room and which one will stay in the master bedroom!
