"Barb" - Farmhouse Side Table Flip

Say H E L L O to Barb-- this precious little flip piece that we just finished. This piece was actually our very first "blog" furniture purchase and we love how it turned out! We named her Barb because when I (Cassidy) pitched the idea to Mal about naming our pieces, the first name I said was "you know, like Barb or something like that..." and so we had to name our first piece Barb!

Here is the process for how exactly we refinished this piece.

Links to all products we used can be found here.

So this is what we started with. We found this piece at a local goodwill for I think $5? We loved the bones of it and how since it was solid wood, we thought it could be a great piece to refinish.

Mal started by completing sanding down the top of the piece-- that was a breeze! Flat surfaces + sanding = easy peasy. But then came the legs-- these legs were a beast to deal with. Mal thinks she spent at least 5 hours with a sander and dremmel stripping the legs of the old orange stain. As you can tell from the picture, the stain was next to impossible to get off around the round edges of the legs. We tried the sander, dremmel, stripping-- to no avail!

Once we got it sanded, we had to decide what we were going to do since we could not get all of the stain off the legs. If you look closely, you can see the dark edges on the legs and in the drawer. This is the part of furniture flips because you can have an image in your head, and then the piece just doesn't work out that way and you have to change your image. We had originally planned to keep this piece a lighter tone stain, but with the darker stain not coming off the legs, that was just not an option.

So, we went with a layer darker stain on the top (see below for details). But when we put the same stain on the legs-- it was just meh. When stain and stripping doesn't work, that's when you have to accept paint. We typically only paint a wood piece as either: (1) a last resort or (2) the effort to strip and stain is just not worth the outcome (e.g. rounded wooden chairs). Alas, we went with a white chalk paint (recipe at the end of this post)*.

Why do we dislike painting? And what did we learn?

When you are working with a solid wood piece, it just feels wrong to cover it in a coat of paint. Trust us, paint is way easier than stripping and staining, but the end result of a solid wood piece-- so satisfying. But honestly, some times painting is just your only option. With the stain not coming off on the legs, the only way to cover it was to paint it. One thing we learned from this piece is when you're working with rounded wood surfaces-- strip one section first. If you find that the stain is just not going to come off, don't waste your time and energy stripping the entire piece (like we did).

How did you stain the top?

One of our favorite things to do is to layer stains. When you layer, you can pull out different tones of the wood with each layer of stain. The three stains that we used to create this look are above: (1) Minwax Weathered Oak, (2) Minwax White Wash Pickling and (3) Minwax Jacobean. Here are the simple steps:

1. Completing wipe down your piece after sanding to remove any leftover dust or grain

2. Using a damp rag, apply the weathered oak stain all over the piece-- wait 5 minutes and wipe off any excess.

3. Give the piece about 24 hours to really soak in the stain

4. Using a paint brush, paint the white wash stain onto the piece and then quickly wipe off. Work in section to never allow the stain to dry. You don't want to wipe off immediately, but you also don't want it to try-- so about a minute or so for each coat.

5. Allow the white wash stain to dry (usually less than an hour)

6. Using a damp rag, apply the jacobean stain over top the same way as the weathered oak-- wait 5 minutes and wipe off any excess.

7. You can repeat steps 4-6 as many times as you want

*Chalk Paint Recipe:

Sample size of flat paint

1 TBSP Plaster of Paris

1 TBSP Calcium Carbonate Powder

1-2 tsp warm water

Mix plaster of paris, calcium carbonate powder and warm water well until no more chunks exist. Start with just 1 tsp of water and slowly add the second tsp as needed. Add liquid to paint sample and thoroughly mix until combined.