A little Gem: Homestead Blue Buffet

Does anyone ever have a color crisis? As in sometimes, you don't know what color to paint a beautiful piece of furniture because truthfully, any color would look amazing? And then there is the "part-two" dilemma of to distress or to not distress? There are some pieces where I see the vision immediately, and there are those that confuse the heck out of me so I store them away until I can make up my mind. This was definitely one of those pieces.

When I finally pulled it back out, I was still indecisive. With bigger pieces, I try to stick to classic colors, but I didn't want to go with white. White was the last resort because it's a color that sells easily, but it can also sometimes be very boring. 

No...this needed some color. Something that would catch your eye, but never bore you, and something that would keep you interested through out the years. And as I scanned my paint shelves, the only one that clearly stuck out was "Homestead Blue," by Fusion Mineral Paint.

I love this paint because I literally had one-coat coverage. I've also used this paint color on our Homestead Blue Library Table and I loved how vibrant the color is with just one coat. I still have about 3/4's of the pint left! It's also a self-sealing acrylic paint, but I used General Finishes HPTC in Satin to seal it because I know this piece will get a lot of storage traffic. I know ours does; it houses all my staging junk!

I also wanted to paint the top but I think my husband was trying to tell me something by stripping off the finish. When I got to it, I couldn't paint that gorgeous wood. So I paired it with GF Antique Walnut gel stain and sealed it with HPTC in Gloss. Just as a note: Anytime you are putting water based products over oil based stains, you MUST wait 72 hours for the stain to dry. Otherwise, you could have bubbling, or chemical residue that just doesn't look very pretty.

The hardware was original to the pieces, all it needed was some shining up. Don't mind the Brasso residue. After I saw these pictures, I cleaned it out with a q-tip.

Distressing finally won the debate, and I'm glad it did. I love how the wood peeking through gives it a burnt auburn warmth. All I did was sand using a 220 grit across the whole surface, and went back over the detail just to bring it out a little more. I like to call this "natural distressing" because sanding is part of (or should be part of) any furniture painting routine. I didn't specifically choose where to place wear marks, I let the sandpaper do that for me.

Here's a closeup of those legs. This paint also distresses very easily. I was selective in choosing not to paint inside those leg crevices (I don't know what the word is) just to give it some added color depth.

I really love how this piece turned out. It's just so pretty!

Here's one last look! Hope you enjoyed this post!

Linking up to Friday's Furniture Fix- 2/26