Bringing Back the Charm

Bring back painted wood without stripping or sandblasting!

I am a lover of paint; it cures many ills that plague a home's character. However, every time I looked at these beautiful rough-sawn wood beams that the previous owner of our home had painted white my stomach lurched!





I spent many hours contemplating and researching how to strip the paint off and bring them back to their original beauty. Honestly though, I just didn't have the ambition in me to sandblast them or spend weeks trying to strip them. It was then I came across a video on YouTube on how to create faux wood floors which looked promising. I tried the technique on a couple of test boards and decided it was worth a try.





First thing was to remove the trim, scrape down the beams, and tape them off!





Next, I applied the buttery-yellow base coat and let it dry overnight.





The next morning I mixed up two bowls of satin enamel latex paint. First color was chocolate brown, the second an almost black-brown. The recipe is a 1:1 ratio with water. It will be very runny. If you can, work in a room that is as cool as you can get it. It will keep the paint from drying too fast.
Use the chocolate brown to totally cover your wood, then come in and highlight the outer edges and any knots with the black-brown. Then immediately use an old dry paintbrush to BACK-BRUSH through the paint, creating grains in your paint. Be sure to have a few dry rags to wipe your brush on, to keep it "dry". Work in sections, if needed, as quickly as you can so you keep a wet edge.





The back-brushing brings out the buttery-yellow in subtle ways, just like weathered wood.





The finished product. It turned out exactly as I had imagined; weathered barn-wood in one weekend! This project cost me a whopping $6.00, using 3 paint samples I had mixed up at my local hardware store.





Now, to get rid of that pool-hall light and fan :)






Original article and pictures take http://www.hometalk.com/13358173/bringing-back-the-charm site