Adventures in Distressing

One of the things I love most about my boyfriend is his encouragement of my DIYing. He recently moved to a new apartment with almost no furniture so he's had to get some. One of the things he decided he needed was a headboard, like a real adult. After looking at tons of headboards online and in stores, we found nothing that he really liked that was in a decent price range until we came across distressed door headboards. He liked the rustic nature of them. We knew raw doors came fairly cheap from home improvement stores, but when we went to look at them, we came across something we both liked even better: Fencing. So he bought some.

He cut it down to the right size and got it ready to distress over in his mom's driveway. This project was too big for either of our apartments.

He full well knew what we had intented for the day and still wore decent clothes. Who does that?
But he was a good sport and beat up the fence like a champion. We used hammers to hit, screwdrivers to stab, and saws to...saw... We also used a baseball bat and some sort of claw thing that Cameron's mom found in her garage. I had heard that when distressing, you should always beat up the piece way more than you think you should because it's probably still not enough. So we beat and beat.

And some times he beat it up a little too well. It usually went like this:
Me: Be careful not to hit it too hard.
Cameron: Don't worry, I got this. *SNAP*
...and it happened more than once.

But it was nothing a little wood glue couldn't fix.

Once it was beat up to our liking, we sanded it for a longggg time. All our pounding and scraping left a lot of little wood shards sticking out that could be dangerous to both Cameron and his bedding so we had to smooth them out.

Then we painted it a nice shade of espresso brown.

The paint made the beatings even more pronounced and awesome. As you can see in this picture, we only messed with the top half of the fence. It didn't make sense to spend time and energy beating up the half that would be hidden behind the bed.

I really love the headboard and so does Cameron. Cheap, custom and masculine? Mission accomplished!


But I couldn't just let Cameron have all the fun.
I have a little black leather chair in my apartment that needed a side table. Because the chair is a very small size and the corner doesn't have much extra space, the table needed to be a lot smaller than anything I was finding. A weekend trip to an antique market/junk yard made me the owner of this gem:

I'm not sure what the original use of this was, but the man was selling them as light fixtures. This one was in a little pile off to the side without a light in it. A little bargining and it was my future side table.
A blank clock face from Michael's was destined to be the top.

 A lot more distressing.. and a little more of Cameron's over-zealous-ness left me with a beautifully beat up piece of wood that was cracked right down the center. Wood glue to the rescue and it was perfect again.

Staining the clock face turned out even better than I could have expected. It was perfect.

 



The wood disk fit right on top of the metal base, attached by a nut and bolt. It's a little tall, but not uncomfortably so. It's a great size for the corner and I really love it.

I'm going to chalk both of these experiments up as successes!