Annie Sloan Chalk Paint Upcycling

I feel compelled to rave about my latest non-crochet project – giving a tired old shelving unit a new lease of life with the help of Annie Sloan chalk paint.

This unit was a hand-me-down from my parents – useful, but increasingly beaten up and battered. It needed saving.

I’ll be honest – I would’ve gone along with the Mr’s idea of taking the unit to the tip if I hadn’t been reading about Annie Sloan chalk paint everywhere recently. But the idea of a furniture paint which requires no prep, no sanding, no primer and one or two coats really appealed to me – I usually stall on my furniture projects fairly early doors because there are just so many annoying steps to go through.

I ordered my paint from Dovetails Vintage. Delivery was nice and quick (next day as promised – and arrived by 10:30am) and the paint was reassuringly well-packaged!

After poring over what seemed like a million project photos and swatches on the internet, I plumped for Louis Blue (as a Louise whose favourite colour is blue, it spoke to me!) and Provence. Originally I intended to use Provence on the drawers and shelf, and Louis Blue on the rest of the unit.

…but I opened Louis Blue first, and I fell in love with it – so Provence remains unopened!

The paint goes on thick and fast – and I mean thick. When I showed it to the Mr, he described it as “almost like a paste” – which is spot on. This is unlike any other paint I’ve used.

It goes on so well, that after one coat, which took about 45 minutes, my unit looked like this:

To top it all off, it dries really quickly too – this is another potential project abandonment point for me. If I have to wait too long to go in with the second coat of paint, there’s a very real chance that second coat of paint won’t ever happen!

When a coat of paint dries in an hour while I’m having a cuppa, I’m much more likely to get my second coat done.

And I did! I put two coats of paint on this beauty in one afternoon. It took about an hour and a half in total. Brilliant.

This was yesterday.

I left my unit to dry overnight, and this evening it looked like this:

The next step is to apply wax to the dry paint – this seals the surface and makes it durable. Because this is chalk paint, without the sealing wax it can be a bit flaky.

The wax stage sounded daunting – and I didn’t have the right tools, having decided against buying a proper brush for the wax. But again, this part was easy. I used two clean all-purpose cloths – one to apply the wax, and one to give the whole unit a wipe down afterwards.

It doesn’t take much wax to cover the surface – I suspect I used more than I had to because of my lack of brush. My hands got a good coating of wax with my cloth technique!

This is where I am with the project at the moment – I feel like I’m pretty close to the end already.

The eagle-eyed among you will notice I haven’t yet painted my shelf, and that I’m one coat away from finishing the drawers. The floor space I had available wouldn’t allow me to do the shelf at the same time as the rest of the unit, so the shelf will follow.

I also have a pretty exciting idea for my new handles – which involves unicorn tails!

All will be revealed in an upcoming post!

Until next time

Elsie Pop xx