Well, the saga of the 40s nightstand upcycle continues.
We re-convened this morning, thinking our mission was almost complete. All that stood between us and the finished product was a small jar of metallic accent cream, in the shade Lucky Penny (again by Country Chic Paint... you can see where our loyalty was for this project!). My, how mistaken we were.
A sort of metallically copper colour, this product was meant to be applied over top of the paint to give it more of a metallic shine (no duh), as opposed to the matte burnt orange colour present after the two coats of paint from last weekend. Armed with sponges and the knowledge conferred from the watching of tutorials, we thought it would be simple: dip the sponge in the new colour, swirl it around on the nightstand, and presto: a finished product.
We were so, so wrong.
Early attempts to sponge the color on in a circular fashion left behind a streaky, gloopy mess. It took a phone call to Vancouver Island to realize that the paint should be applied with a sponge in linear fashion (i.e. no going back and forth like had been done early on). Seems straightforward enough, right?
Yeah, not yet.
The result using the new "one-way" technique still created a streaky look with some clumps of paint leftover. So, using the sponge, and a smaller sponge brush, we attempted to go back and pick up some of the residual paint, and just generally smoothen things out.
Again: a disaster.
We were pulling paint up and making things look more streaky; areas that were fine were rendered worse than they were initially. And, to make matters worse, we were stupid and kept accidentally touching the parts that we had just painted, meaning there were also the occasional fingerprint evident in the wet paint (protip: try to avoid doing that).
On top of all that was the fact that this stuff seemed to take longer to dry than the initial paint itself did. So, we didn't get a chance to do a second coat. Slightly problematic, as we've been told that we'll probably need 4 to 5 coats of this stuff to achieve the desired look. One (almost complete... we didn't quite finish every surface) coat took almost the entire jar of the topper, which now means there's two more jars in the mail, and we may possibly need two more jars after that.
My thoughts on today? The colour itself is really pretty. Our technique just needs some work, clearly! Despite the initial belief that a little would go a long way, it's almost seeming like it would be best to just order a bunch upfront and return the unused material. But as they say, hindsight is 20/20.
At the end of the session, the jury was still out about the thoughts on the progress we made. Though the colour shows some promise, we're really hoping more coats of it will mask our early mistake, and turn our slightly disastrous start around.
But hey, if it doesn't, we can always just paint over it and start this whole process again, right?!
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