4 the love of wood: BLACK MILK PAINT - used on a chest of drawers

BE-CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

I wanted to working with milk paint more to see if I liked it. I had only dabbled a bit with it to this point. I decided to jump head first in to do a big black chest of drawers. Black is also a very tricky finish to get right but I tried.

In the end she looks respectable but it took a
ton of work and regular paint to get this look.

It comes in a powder form and you mix it with water.

This brand has an earthy unpleasant smell when mixing it.

Once mixed it has a short shelf life.

The first evening the paint started to flake ... EVERYWHERE

This photo BELOW shows what was happening fairly well,

but it wasn't nice, it wasn't shabby chic, it was awful.

I hadn't painted the sides, which saved me some time later.

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I had to step back and think about this so I moved on to the hardware. I didn't care for the style or placement of the original handles, so I filled the holes in and chose a new location.

I searched high and low for a nice set of 8 handles that would work. I could only find 2 sets of 4 so I painted them all the same color, oil rubbed bronze paint by Rustoleum.

I had to do some repairs underneath before I

could add the new legs I found at Windsor Plywood.

BACK TO THE PAINT

It was adhering to the top better then the front. It was looking pretty neat with all the chipping and flaking but this was total different then the first day. With a great amount of sanding and poly I got it to where I was happy.

So I decided to match the sides to the top, but

I used a black wash with regular paint and poly.

The front was in such bad shape with all the flaking black Milk Paint, I put it aside for a month. One morning I sat in the shade and hand sanded every inch of the drawers so I could spray some grey primer on them. And then I did a beautiful smooth black spray job.