Another week, another update on the laundry room makeover over at Kristen’s house! It was a last minute decision to join up with the One Room Challenge this year – but we thought “why not?!” we need to be staying home and self-isolating anyway! So here we are… if you missed the first couple weeks definitely take a look back to see what our plan and inspirations are.

Week 1 / Week 2 / Week 3 (you are here) / Week 4 / Week 5 (canceled) / Week 6 / Week 7 / Week 8

For this week, we added some paint to an old beaten down, vintage style drop leaf table that will now be a sort of folding table or a place to hold all of our clean clothes before putting them away. This little table once served as a dinette table in our tiny apartment, but then was demoted to the garage in our first home. We didn’t really have a place for it and it just kind of got stuck there.

But when moving to our 2nd (and hopefully forever) home I had a great idea for it! With all of the extra space in this home, I knew it couldn’t just get stuck back in the garage to be used as junk storage.

So while waiting to move I decided it needed to go in the laundry room as a folding table since I couldn’t create a folding area over the top of my washer and dryer like I LOVED in my previous home. (If you have the space to create a folding table OVER your washer and dryer check that post out HERE). This new house had a top load washer which made the folding counter over the washer and dryer impossible, but I used it so much in my previous home I knew I needed something in this new house.

Except we had a slight problem….we hadn’t taken good care of it… it had some paint splatters and stains and one side was broken. But if you know Vicki or I that doesn’t stop us! We restyle furniture for a living and I knew I could make it pretty again!

The plan for this table was to keep it vintage-y and old looking so we turned to one of our favorite paints – Miss Mustard Seed’s Milk Paint. Authentic powder milk paint is pretty much the only paint we have found to create that very old-world, chippy paint look.

I decided to go with one of my very favorite colors, Farmhouse White, because I love white and wood together and new the wood peeking through the white would be gorgeous! It took at least 4 coats of the white because, well hey, whites ALWAYS take a lot of coats! In our experience, no matter what paint you use, you almost always need a minimum of 3 coats. With this table we did 4 coats on the entire piece – undersides included since the leaves dropped and you could see them.

We haven’t found the true “secret” to chippiness, as it can sometimes be unpredictable because it depends on the wood, the varnish, the oils or polish that was used previously. This table was dry and very old, but I decided NOT to sand it down to help with any chippiness that may happen. (I did have to clean all the garage dirt off of it though!)

After cleaning and NOT sanding it was time to just paint it all on! 4 coats of paint does take a while, however, with milk paint, the dry time is so low. As soon as it dries, which is usually about a half hour, you can go paint right over it! After about coat 2 or 3 I could see places that were starting to crackle and chip away – which is exactly what I wanted. Once all 4 coats were on and dry I began to take different tools to make the paint on the table chip. I started with sand paper, but only a small amount of chipping was happening, so I grabbed a metal putty knife and got more paint to chip off! You have to be careful with a tool like this that it doesn’t just scratch a line in your surface, but instead just go over it lightly to try to take paint off as you wish.

And I just absolutely love how it turned out! I did seal the paint with water based “Tough Coat” so the paint wouldn’t chip further. I didn’t want oil or wax over the paint since I was using it for the specific purpose of putting clothes on top of it.

I’m sure I will probably change the decor on top about 8 times before we are finished with this room, but that’s alright! I still need to finish the board and batten AND paint the cabinets, which are pretty large jobs. But that’s alright – I’ll get it done!

Products Used: MMS Milk Paint in “Farmhouse White” / Tough Coat (as a sealer) / Paint Brush