Whitewashing Furniture Techniques

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Steve Anthony. I'm a handy man here in New York City. Whitewashing furniture techniques are sometimes also known as pickling, and the effect that is essentially achieved is that it's sort of a semi-transparent light finish over wood. You've seen this, it gives sort of a French country look to a piece of furniture. If you're a home owner, you're doing some remodeling, maybe you bought a piece of furniture, maybe a chair that maybe seen as better days. You can really bring a lot of life and a lot of new use into an older piece of furniture by doing some whitewashing or pickling. The easiest way to do it is probably just take some, whatever if you want to use a white wash literally then you can simply take a rag or a brush and dip it in your paint, you can use a latex paint if you want. Whether you're going to use water base, it doesn't matter, it's up to you and if you diluted enough solute, it's fairly thin, you can just rub it on to give a little bit of wash to the surface, and how much of that is opaque and then how much of it is transparent, it's up to you. And it depends on how much you've diluted the paint. Then and once you have achieved the look that you want, you can varnish right over to seal it or you can wax it if you like. Another technique is to whitewash the furniture and then take sand paper and knockdown the finish so you're revealing some of the wood underneath. And then you could finish right over top of that with your varnish or shellac, whatever you want to use to seal the wood. How you want to apply this is up to you, it's the picture of simplicity allows for a lot of, allows for a lot of mistakes to be covered up because it has it's sort of an older, weathered look to it and you can change it as much as you like until you've achieved the desired effect."