Shelf Makeover

I gave this shelf a distressed white makeover using homemade chalk paint!

I’m a huge trial & error crafter.

A lot of my projects don’t turn out as planned & some of them don’t turn out at all!  It doesn’t help that I’m super impulsive with crafting, either.  Like, I’ll get an idea in my head for something & I have to do it RIGHT NOW or else!

This little shelf was no exception.  After seeing it on our wall for months with the intention of painting it, I finally got the ‘RIGHT NOW’ feeling last week & just had to paint it.

Because of my impulsiveness, I didn’t even bother to take ‘before’ pictures.  That’s also because a lot of my craft projects don’t turn out & I thought this would be one of them. I was just going to paint a little bit & see what happened.  No need for ‘before’ pics!

Wow…was I wrong!

I did manage to find a really bad ‘before’ pic from the pictures I took for my command center makeover post!  If you look super close, you can catch the tiniest glimpse of the shelf in question!  That’s the best I’ve got!

Alright…back to the painting!

I had some leftover homemade chalk paint from another abandoned project that I decided to use on the shelf.  I’ll be writing another post all about my homemade chalk paint experience soon, but in the meantime, this is the recipe to mix up the paint.  The paint color I used was “North Star” by Sherwin-Williams, even though my end result was more white in color.

Surprisingly, this shelf was really easy to paint.  I usually get super frustrated with furniture painting because of the different angles & the need to stop & let things dry before I can move on to another side.  I really didn’t have that problem with this piece!  I painted the bottom & the sides first.  I let that dry & then painted the top.  By that time, I could go back over the sides a little without disturbing the top.  I did have to take breaks, but luckily the paint dried fast & I could come back to it fairly quickly.

Then I tried my hand at distressing.  I wish I wouldn’t have waited for the shelf to completely dry before distressing, though!  I had such a difficult time getting the original color back out!  First, I tried using a sanding sponge.  That got me pretty much nowhere!  Then I used heavier sandpaper & after a ton of elbow grease, I finally got it to distress!  After all of that was completed, I sealed it with clear satin polyurethane.

I’m super in love with the end result!  I especially love the distressing!  This shelf completely exceeded my expectations!  It also made me realize that I need to take ‘before’ pics of everything because I never know when something that I think will be lackluster turns out amazing!