If you have solid wood furniture but they don’t quite match your new decor anymore, trust me when I say that they’re worth keeping and refinishing. I’ve been working on several pieces of furniture for a friend that recently built a new home. All of her furniture was a country, honey pine or cherry color stain, but her new home is modern grays and whites. Her furniture is solid wood and has basic lines, so all it needed was a modern makeover to bring it up to date. See how these pine side tables get a modern makeover.
She sent over a set of three pine tables. This sofa table and two matching end tables. Here’s the sofa after a good sanding with my electric DeWalt rotary sander (affiliate link).
The tables would be in her finished basement used mostly by her boys, which meant that whatever finish was applied had to be durable! So I opted for the most durable paint I’ve used to date – ENAMEL.
Enamel paint hardens like no other paint I’ve found. Benjamin Moore makes Ultra Spec DTM acrylic enamel paint and Valspar makes a cabinet enamel, all of which work great on furniture. They dry quickly in just a few hours and require no topcoat.
I’m not talking, you’re basic semi-gloss acrylic (which I noticed they now label as enamel) that you use on the wood trim in your home or the Benjamin Moore Advance which is an alkyd. They’ll tell you those paints don’t need a topcoat. When used on furniture, you have to be really careful with them because while they feel dry and smooth after a few hours, it actually takes up to 60 days for them to fully cure. And even after the 60 days, I’ve still put things on top of furniture painted in the Advance, only to have the paint lift off. Uuuugggg! So frustrating!
These Benjamin Moore DTM’s and Valspar Cabinet enamels harden almost right way. You can feel the difference so you know they’ll be durable. If this paint doesn’t hold up in my friends basement, I’m not sure any paint will.
The only other option would be a black stain with a high gloss brush-on polyurethane. Trust me, I considered that. But you see that back panel on the inside of the sofa table… it’s veneer. I tested it, but it wouldn’t hold the stain 🙁 When refinishing furniture, the piece will tell you what it needs and this one needed paint!
A coat of primer and two coats of paint later. They’re now modern and will look great in my friend’s new home…
If you live in the Boston area and have a solid wood furniture pieces that need an update, let’s talk about how paint or stain could transform them. See this info on my custom furniture painting & staining services…
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Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links to products I love and use myself.
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