4th of July weekend

I recently had my birthday and my wonderful husband gave me some chalk paint powder from BB Frosch. I've been wanting to try this product our for a long time so I wanted to get started right away, and luckily I had the perfect piece to start with.

This vintage Chippendale desk with batwing hardware and rope molding. Now these pictures actually make this piece look better than it did in person. Trust me when I say there was no way I wasn't going to paint it.  It was pretty far gone. 

 Plus it was a disgusting mess. We brought it into the cool air conditioned house before I cleaned up the cobwebs and dust, the estate sale I bought it from said it had been in their garage for awhile, but soon I found out that wasn't the only mess that needed cleaning.

 This is one of the more mild pictures, but all over the bottom of the drawers, especially the ones at the bottom of the desk, and inside of the actual bottom of the desk I found these disgusting brown little bug pod things that just were clinging in every crevice and crack. My skin was crawling, I was completely grossed out, and yes I spent HOURS cleaning and cleaning and disinfecting this desk.

This picture above shows how they were all over the bottom inside, not the best picture, but lets be honest here, you really don't want to see it anyway right? Thankfully I believe the bugs were long gone, or just died in there years ago because they were actually pretty brittle. I still don't know what it really was, but I've never seen this before in my life and I hope to never have to clean that up again.

After it was clean Nate helped me fill in the holes from the original hardware with wood filler. The new drawer pulls I want to put on here are just barely too wide for the existing holes.

 Here was the very professional method we used to mix our chalk paint. :) An older disposable Tupperware with a 1 cup measurement marked on the side.

We measured the 2 tablespoons of chalk paint powder then added the 1-1 1/2 tablespoons of water, mixed it then added 1 cup of paint. Which we pored right into the Tupperware but just went above the line to compensate for the height of the powder mixture.

 The paint I chose was a $5 sample can of Sherwin Williams - Snowbound.

 I painted the first coat and almost went through a all of the paint I had mixed.

 So I mixed some more and did the second coat which was looking much better but not quite enough.

 I was a little disappointed that 2 coats wasn't enough because one of the big claims with chalk paint is that it has better coverage and needs less coats, but without a primer and with this dark stain going to white, I shouldn't be too harsh.

 So here it is with 3 coats, so I used 6 tablespoons of my chalk paint powder. Tomorrow I'm hoping to get the wax on and then the hardware and she'll be done and ready to be used.