HOW TO PAINT FURNITURE

Before we start learning how to paint furniture, you need to determine what sort of furniture you want to paint.

• New unfinished furniture
• Old unfinished furniture
• New painted, stained, varnished or waxed furniture
• Previously painted furniture
• Old painted, varnished, stained or waxed furniture

You need to be quite clear about what sort of painting project you are going to do because you will have to handle very different preparations and use very different equipment with each of these projects.

NEW UNFINISHED FURNITURE

The majority of new unfinished furniture is ready for priming, staining and varnishing. This is assuming you want the piece of furniture to be varnished. You may wish to paint it. Whether new or old, furniture which is to receive a painted finish must be smooth, clean and dry. You may even decide you want a decorative finish applied. (Decorative finishes such as antiquing, marbling, and gilding – will be covered in another blog as they are quite complicated and there are many of them).

Check and see if there are any scratches, nicks or grooves in the wood. If there are, then fill them with wood filler and wait for it to dry. Once dry it will need to be sanded level with the surrounding wood. Use a medium grade sandpaper on it. Then lightly sand the whole piece of furniture with No: # 1 grade paper – always sand in the direction of the grain. This creates ‘tooth’. Tooth is a slightly raised surface on the wood which allows the primer to seep into the wood and cling to it.

Next use a clean cloth to wipe down the whole piece of furniture as the dust from the sanding process needs to be completely removed.

PRIMERS

You can either use a special wood primer for enamel paint or you can use some of the enamel paint as a primer. Pour some of the finishing paint into an empty tin and thin with about ten percent of pure spirits of turpentine. Apply to the furniture with a soft, flat bristle brush, using a two-and-one-half inch size for broad, flat surfaces such as chair seats or table tops, and a brush from one to two inches wide for the narrow portions.

Next apply a second and third coat of just as it comes from the can unless it is too thick then it should be slightly thinned. Don’t thin it as much as you did for the initial primer as that should be the thinnest coat of all. Brush each coat out as thinly and evenly as possible. When thickly applied, paint will not dry properly. Allow 24 – 36 hours between each coat and lightly sand the dry paint with a No. 00 sandpaper to remove brush marks, wiping off the dust immediately you have finished the sanding.

FINISHING COAT

Providing the primer coats match the color of the finishing coat completely, one finishing coat of enamel may be use but two is much better. Forty-eight hours should be allowed for drying the first coat of enamel, and the surface may be lightly smoothed with No. 00 sandpaper before the finishing coat is applied.

Enamel is applied straight from the can, without thinning, and should be flowed on with a full brush. Streaks and brush marks must be avoided as much as possible. On broad, flat surfaces, brush first with the grain of the wood, then across the grain so that you spread the paint evenly, and finish by brushing finally with the grain, using light strokes to smooth the surface. Remember that enamel sets more quickly than does ordinary paint, and so you must work quickly.

CHOOSING YOUR PAINT COLOR AND TYPE

Once upon a time, white or ivory painted furniture or dark stained and varnished furniture was the norm. But today colors are big. Some of the colors you may wish to consider canary yellow, Chinese red, apple-green, many different shades of blue, blue-green, apple-green, or mulberry. The sky is the limit.

The method I have described above is just one of the ways, but I found a neat book full of ways to paint furniture, from the plain and simple to the more complex.

I learned quite a bit from some really great books…  here’s one of them

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50 Ways to Paint Furniture: The Easy, Step-by-Step Way to Decorator Looks