How to Achieve a Gray Wash | Christina Muscari

hi everybody its Christina from pretty distress in today's video I'm gonna show you how to take an old dark dresser like this and transform it into a rustic barn wood Restoration Hardware type of feel you're interested in taking a piece of furniture and getting it to look like this just keep watching here is my piece I'm gonna work on today this is another part of my bedroom set this is my nightstand I have two of them so I'm going to kind of be redoing them in tandem and the first thing I'm gonna do to get this dark stain off is use citrus trip and the reason I'm doing this is because my veneer on here was really thin a lot of times I use an orbital sander to get a finish off which has always worked really well for me in the past but with this wood there was a really thin veneer and what that means is it's a piece of wood that's glued on to like MDF or plywood and as I was sanding it I was stripping straight down to that MDF and when you get to that you can't stay matte and it doesn't you lose the wood grain and everything so what I ended up doing was getting this citrus stripper and since I'm refinishing inside today I'm opening all my windows I'm opening my door I'm getting a good cross Breeze in here I'm also gonna wear a respirator and splash goggles and latex gloves to protect myself I really recommend doing this outside it's cold so I can't do this outside and it's easier for me to film for you guys if I do it inside so please just use like common sense and figure out what works best for you so we're gonna be using this chip brush it's just a nice cheap brush that we're gonna be able to throw away when we're done have a pair of nitrile gloves if these are really heavy-duty and their can be used with chemicals they're chemical graded so that they're gonna be safe though such a shirt will eat through them might splash and impact goggles I have this 3-pack plastic putty knife set have this little brass brush that's gonna help get into our crevices so is a wire brush some coarse steel wool to help get into the cracks of crevices this is my respirator mask with filters for vapours plate or a cardboard box to catch all my stuff so I have my goggles on and I have my gloves on and what you're gonna do is take your citrus trip and you're gonna pour it in a metal bowl do metal because sometimes the stuff kid melts through whatever container you better than okay so I'm gonna pour this in here with my goggles on close your lid so you don't spill this on your floor okay so I have my chip brush I'm just gonna dip this in here just like that get a little bit of product on here and I'm gonna start painting you want to do this pretty thick so that it's like clinging on there and it's gonna start reacting with the finish and strip it off careful not to splash it everywhere and I'll start taking off paint off the walls and on your floor and everywhere else so that's why it's the best idea to do it in a garage and that's where I did my first piece but I wanted to be able to film really well for you guys and not have that outside ambient noise you know garbage trucks and school buses and all that so I am braving inside to do this for you showing you this first part and then I am gonna put my mask on for the rest of it I just wanted you guys to be able to hear me while I'm talking explaining putting this on I'm gonna go into hyperspeed and paint this over the entire piece and put my mask [Music] so I took the drawers out of the dresser I took the hardware off and I'm just stripping them separately I think that makes it a lot easier to do and kind of creates less of a mess okay so I let this sit for thirty minutes and now I'm gonna take a paint scraper I have plastic ones too these can sometimes the metal ones can sometimes gouge so I'm going to show you both I don't like make you mind making gouges because I like distressed furniture so I'll just show you both if you have either one either one will work so then I got my paper here okay so here is the plastic one I actually like the way this plastic one is working better so I'm gonna use this one look at cool okay this happened last time too so this part is sticking and not a lot of stuff is coming off here but that's okay I will do a second kind of application of the stripper and get all the little problems areas cleaned up so don't worry if you're seeing stuff something like this where the stain isn't lifting okay so this is what the first round of stripper did so as you can see a lot of it is still stuck on there that's totally normal so I am just gonna do a second pass and add more stripper and see how much more we can get off you don't have to do the whole thing just kind of do the areas that need that extra love so you don't have to apply it to the entire top print trying to get some more of this oh oh this goes oh yeah oh yeah nice so do not get discouraged if it doesn't all come off in the first pass so you just got to keep keep at it you guys if you like peeling skin after you get a sunburn you're really gonna love doing this but as you can see I have a few a little sticky spots left I'm gonna grab this steel wool this is coarse so it's a number zero put some of the stripper on here and then give it a rub and it'll kind of take off those little do you see how it's getting those extra stuck on bits so just kind of keep adding a little bit of the stripper and I'm not too concerned I don't think this really scratches up the surface that much but I'm not really concerned with it because the finish that we're going for is like kind of a rustic finish so this doesn't really need to be super smooth so don't get worried about if this is gonna scratch the top so see how all that's coming up yeah so awesome and it keeps gunking up so I just you know turn it over I think it's too loaded up and if it gets too loaded up I can get another piece so don't be scared to go back in and just keep it'll just keep lifting it and left in it especially on curves like this it's hard to get in there with the scraper so this is where the steel wool comes in handy okay now I'm gonna show you this little brush again this is brass so it is gonna scratch the wood up a little bit so if you're concerned about the wood getting stretched scratched up they have different ones like nylon ones you can use but I like my wood to get scratched up especially since I know I'm doing that wash so see how easily that takes that off but it is scratching the wood up a little bit so just know that but for the look that we're going for looks completely fine like it's gunked-up but I just take a shop towel and I just kind of keep wiping it off and getting that gunk out and this can go flying so just kind of hit use a gentle hand [Music] you will see that there is still some like little brown specks of residue I'm gonna keep that I like that because when we go and add the paint and the wax I like to have a little bit of that dark in there it just makes it look aged so don't freak out if you have like a few spots that aren't coming off especially if it's in the cracks and crevices that is really gonna add to what the finish looks like in the end okay so now that I've gotten most of the stain off I'm going to take this denatured alcohol and do a 50/50 mix and water so I got water in here and pouring this in here you news mineral spirits too so if you have that use that so I'm just taking a clean cloth and I'm just gonna wipe this down to get all that citrus trip residue off [Music] okay so the piece has dried and this is what it's looking like again you can see it has like an uneven finish but when we put the wash on and do the wax it's gonna it's all gonna flow together so don't freak out if you're seeing unevenness like that I had that last time and it turned out great so the next step is I'm gonna sand and I'm gonna sand with my orbital sander just because it's gonna go faster you definitely do not have to use an orbital sander you don't have an orbital sander you can just use a piece of sandpaper fold it up and rub it on here if you have a sanding block that makes it even easier to so you just wrap this around there and you can use it right on there make sure you go with the grain so as you can see here this is my grain so I'm gonna go up and down when I'm saying you just follow these lines and that's what going with the grain means so I'm gonna give everything a good sand and prepare it for painting and since I'm using this guy on top of my goggles and my respirator that I'm going to use I'm also going to do some ear protection because this thing gets pretty loud [Music] okay I've sanded everything down so now I am taking a tech claw and I'm just gonna rub up all the death stuff so give everything a good white what I want to do is lighten this up a little bit with a whitewash and what a wash is is it some paint finned out really watered down and so when I go to apply it I'm gonna put it on and then kind of wipe it off right away and it's just gonna leave a light wash of that color hence why it's called a wash to make my wash I want to do a 50/50 ratio of water and paint so to do that I'm just going to get a empty plastic container you can use a cup anything that you want and I have a little 8 ounces of water here so I'm just going to pour 2 ounces in here and I'm gonna take a marker and just kind of mark where that is and then I'm gonna add 2 more ounces of water so I'm just going to make a line where that water is okay so as you can see I have two lines so my first line is gonna be my paint line and then my second line is gonna be my water line have my container all marked off so I'm going to mix my paint and water in there color I'm using today is Dixie Belle drop cloth it is an off-white so I'm just gonna shake up my paint but I'm gonna pour my paint into that first line there then I'm gonna add my water until it reaches that second line that I made and then I'm gonna mix it up really well just give that a good stir for about 30 seconds you want to make sure that paint evenly distributes throughout all that water this can get pretty messy so I do use gloves during this just so I don't have to wash all that paint off when I'm done these are just painters rags they're old t-shirts and stuff that have been recycled and when you're buying these you just want to make sure that you're buying ones that say load lint or no lint or you can just use a t-shirt that you have around your house so you're gonna use one to apply the paint and then you're gonna use one to wipe off the paint okay so I'm just gonna take my first rag and dip it in my paint and as you can see it's very watery doing this you want to work a section at a time so I'm going to start all the way at the top and drag it all the way down and I think it just makes easier if you do it in sections so I'm gonna wipe it as much as I can and then I'm gonna go right back over it and get the excess off like that's looking a little patchy to me so I'm gonna try to rub in somewhere paint there this you just kind of have to play with and get a feel for and don't get too like freaked out if something's looking really streaky because once once we're gonna put the add some gray wax to it that's gonna add more color and depth to it but yeah see that helped so you just kind of have to play with it like see it's all patchy here I'm gonna add some paint there and I just don't like to let the paint sit on there very long before I go back and rub it off so it's kind of work in tandem with both hands you're ready for the last step finally which is gonna be waxing I'm using dixiebell best dang wax in grunge gray is a tinted wax so it's gonna add a little bit of color to our piece and seal it all at the same time all you need to apply this is another one of those lip free cloths or old t-shirt you can also apply this with a wax brush if you have one but if you're new to refinishing furniture I definitely recommend using a rag I'm just gonna take my rag and wrap it around my fingers and dip it into the wax get a little bit of wax on there and then I'm just gonna start rubbing it into the piece if you haven't used wax before I really want you to think of it instead of sitting on top of the piece think of it as hand lotion and rubbing it in into the wood and into the wood grain it's all becoming kind of like cohesive and one thing so you don't just kind of put it on and then move to the next section you sit there and you really like rub that in and think about just rubbing lotion into your hands until it's kind of just one with a piece and look at that beautiful color that that's adding it's just deepening the whole piece and really making it look pretty if you like the way it looks without adding the gray you could totally use a clear wax and just wax this piece if you like the way it looks just after you wash it this is just the process that I did and I think it's kind of the closest dupe to like some of my favorite Restoration Hardware finishes the nice thing about using a colored wax too is that you can tell where you're putting it so you know that your whole piece is going to be protected so I'm just going to do this whole process over the entire piece [Music] okay after this sets for fifteen or twenty minutes you're just gonna go back over it with a clean cloth and buff it out this is going to make sure that you don't have any gloves or gloops and that everything is evenly distributed and buffed out this is the hardware I'm using for my nightstands it's from Target and I did get mine in store but you can also get it online and it comes with a six of these just to remind you what we started with here is a look of how my nightstands looked before and here they are after I like to let my wax cure for 30 days before I permanently place anything on top of it so make sure that once you're done with your piece you're not setting any decorative items on it for 30 days I've placed some lamps on here just to show you what these look like but I am gonna take these off after I'm done thanks for watching this video all the way to the end I hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial I hope you have fun trying it out send me your before-and-afters and you can leave me a comment or any questions you have about the process below don't forget to subscribe before you leave and I'll see you guys next time

Channel: Dixie Belle Paint Company

Views: 137,819

Rating: 4.9013915 out of 5

Keywords: #dixie belle paint, #dixie belle paint company, #chalk mineral paint, #chalk paint, #dixie belle paint tutorials, #how to paint, #diy, #chalk paint brands, #diy projects, #tutorials, #how to videos, #painting videos, #painting tutorials, #how to, #painting ideas, #best chalk paint, #where to buy chalk paint, #painting furniture, #furniture painting, #do it yourself, #painting

Id: KGuCI-Jlt_c

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 17 2019