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Writer's pictureEugenia

Adventures in Refinishing (badly!) (Part 1)

Maybe badly is too strong a word. I've been told it is. And it's not...terrible, but...I'm not feeling fabulous about where I am with this project right now.


I started refinishing the brown cabinet & the first few days were...awful. The first layers of paint were blotchy & awful.

I only did two layers of the pink wash. It was quite vivid & I was worried about not being able to cover it completely with the lighter pastels that would make up the majority of the colors of the cabinet. I also left the hardware on originally & didn't cover the resin drawers for their protection, which was pretty lazy of me. After gunking them up with paint a bit, I carefully pried them off & set them aside to reapply later.


Next I added layers of pastel green. It took around three layers for it to being to look opaque, though it took five thin layers before I got complete coverage. It was during the painting of the green that I realized I needed to start sanding to even out my paint job. Though I was being careful and doing thin layers, the paint washes were beginning to gunk up into thick sections in places & I wanted to nip that in the bud before it got to be too heavy. So I started sanding as I went.


I missed showing a color, but between the green and the final cream color, there is a layer of blue. I think that ultimately, you will be able to see the blue in the finished product; the more I work, the less sure I am that you'll be able to see the earlier colors, but that's a problem for another day. As you can see, between the blue & the cream, it got even lumpier with paint. So now is the time to get REALLY serious about the sanding!


I'm going to stop here, because anxiety is setting in and I need a few days to process. I'm starting to feel like I'm ruining this piece more than I'm improving it. We'll see how if I feel better about it once I've had time to sit with it!

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