I have owned this armoire for many years and recently decided that it needed to be spruced up. This made for the perfect weekend project.

I mixed up some DIY chalk paint – a fabulous, lazy person’s paint that is thick, matte and does not require a piece to be sanded or primed before painting. You can find the recipe on my blog. I used some light blue and yellow latex paint I already had from another project and the chalk paint mixture to make a really pretty light teal. I then wiped down the armoire with a damp cloth and removed the hardware.

I used the metallic paint as a first coat. In hindsight I should have primed first since I was using the metallic paint as the base coat, not the chalk paint, but oh well, I was lazy and it worked out just fine. I then painted two coats of the chalk paint and waited for those to dry overnight before distressing. I simply rubbed a damp washcloth over certain areas to reveal the metallic paint below. Because I didn’t prime beneath the metallic paint, when I tried sanding, it completely took off all layers of paint. Sanding is usually my preferred method for distressing, but in this case the damp washcloth worked perfectly.

I also decided to add a little personalization with a graphic. My graphic is an image of a really old letter addressed to someone in Naples. The postmark circle is from the Graphics Fairy, http://thegraphicsfairy.com/. She has all kinds of fabulous free graphics. There are several ways to transfer graphics onto furniture, but I ended up deciding to use graphite paper to trace the writing onto the armoire. Some people are good enough to do lettering by hand with a small paintbrush, but I’m definitely not one of those people. I used the free website http://www.blockposters.com/ to enlarge the image and then I printed it onto a couple of sheets of legal paper. I just taped the graphite paper and print out to the armoire and traced with a red ballpoint pen so I could see where I had already traced. I then colored in the traced graphite lines with the paint pen. It was slightly tedious, but took less than 30 min’s.

Once all of the paint was dry, I gave the entire piece a coat of glaze (2 parts glaze, 1 part chalk paint) for protection. I wanted this to have a patina feel…I’m slightly obsessed with that right now. Without knowing the look I was going for, Mike said the armoire looked like an old penny, so it seemed to be a success. I went from wanting to give this armoire away to loving it, and the whole project was under $40!