Over this past 4th of July weekend while Josh and I were starting the beginning stages of packing the house up for our big move, we found our old cedar chest in one of the guest bedroom closets. We bought this thing over a year ago at an estate sale with every intention of refinishing it. I really wish I had taken a picture of it when we first bought it (completely covered with floral wall paper and painted in puke green-it was a cheap price for high quality furniture though!), then you would really be able to see it's true transformation. However; after striping off the wall paper and sanding down the paint we kind of lost interest in it and reverted to sticking it in the closet.
After making our recent rediscovery I told Josh that I had a new plan for the old piece, forget "refinishing" ('cause lets face it, that'll never happen), lets paint and distress! He was cool with the idea, so I dug out some old white paint out of the garage we had for painting trim work. Also, I thought I'd mix in a small amount of the green paint that we had left over from painting the kitchen to tone the straight white color down just a tad - it worked perfectly for future reference!
It took about 4 coats of paint to completely cover over the wood surface (that's painting a coat, then lightly sanding the surface to take the brush strokes out, then painting the next coat. etc.,). After the painting process was complete, we went back and used a fine grain sand paper to do a little touch of distressing to give it some character, and viola! We were both very pleased with the outcome. Looking forward to putting it in our new home!
Before shot of the top (with Duke posing).
Before shot from the side
After- front
After