Buffet Table Revamp {Tutorial}

This is another one of my favorite revamps that we recently did for the Studio 319 Salon and Boutique remodel. If you missed my posting a couple weeks ago about the remodel, you can find it here.

This buffet revamp was so much fun for us to do and we were all amazed by the dramatic transformation. It's the first piece of furniture that customers see when they walk in the main door at Studio 319, so we really wanted to the piece to set the tone for what to expect in the rest of the salon. Here is the before picture (I forgot to take the before picture before I started to prime):







Sharon and I love Aidan Gray furniture and finishes. The Aidan Gray look served as our inspiration for most of the furniture revamps that we did and we wanted this buffet to ultimately have a similar Aidan Gray finish like these gorgeous Aidan Gray pieces:





We were absolutely thrilled with our final results and while it is not Aidan Gray, we are very, very happy with the transformation! Our new cheesy joke is that our revamps are "Shady Gray" {Sharon and Cyndy = Shady}:










The first thing we did with this revamp was to clean and sand the table with a hand sander. We wanted to remove the finish so the paint could go down into the many cracks and open wood areas on the piece. We then lightly primed the buffet (primer was white and then waited two hours for the primer to dry. We then painted on two heavy coats of a satin latex paint in a beautiful light taupe color and let the piece dry completely overnight. We wanted the paint heavy because we knew we were going to heavily sand and wanted a chalky look.

The next morning, we sanded with an electric hand sander with the finest grade of paper we could find. We sanded only in the direction of the wood grain. We sanded and sanded and sanded! We sanded just shy of hitting wood. However, in some strategic areas, we scuffed up and sanded an area over and over until we got down to the original wood to slightly distress the piece.

Around the legs, we sanded by hand, again with fine sand paper. We were lucky, there was three of us working on this piece because of all of the sanding. It did take a lot of time but in the end, it was well worth the effort and the gorgeous chalky finish that we obtained.








We decided to not glaze or wax the piece with Annie Sloan wax. We just left it as is because we were afraid that we would loose the chalky finish if we did anything to finish it. However, unfortunately, we will have to seal the top with a matte/satin polyurethane because of the high traffic retail setting.







Well that's it for now and please check over the next few weeks for more of the furniture revamps that we did for the remodel. You can always subscribe to The Exchange and receive a notification of new postings via email if you want to be sure that you see the new project postings. You can subscribe to The Exchange via email by clicking here.

As always, thank you so much for your sweet comments, emails and notes! I so appreciate your feedback. A BIG thank you to Laurie at Tip Junkie who featured our side table revamp from last week, also from the Studio 319 remodel which you can click the picture below if you missed it last week:



Have a wonderful weekend!

Cheers!

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