Coffee Tableau: Part II, or, the Stain

The next step in distressing the wood for the coffee table involved staining it a couple of times.  I followed a technique the couple at Young House Love did, but adapted it a little bit.  We wanted a brown finish, but first I did a "quick" coat of black stain, to bring out the indents, divots, hollows, holes, crevasses, gullies, caves, and whatever-it-was-that-Yoda-lived-in-on-Dagobah.

To keep the black stain from soaking in too much, you first brush water onto the wood.  I got the best results from brushing a good amount of water onto the wood, then immediately slathering on a healthy amount of black stain.  I generally left it on somewhere between 60 and 90 seconds, I think-- the fumes kind of made time fade away.  Also, the stain I used was really, really old, so you may get different results.  The guy at the local hardware store where I bought it told me that this rusty can of stain came over with him from a previous hardware store he owned when he opened the current store 15 years ago.  I think he said something about how this stain had "boot black in it, like the old timers use"; I wasn't 100% listening after the whole hardware-store-timeline thing, but he did give me the can for $2.00 so I politely nodded.

After the 60-90 seconds of fume-enhanced reality, I sort of half-heartedly wiped the stain off with a paper towel.  I didn't remove all of the stain, since I wanted to leave it in all of the aforementioned Yoda holes.  I guess I would say I used the amount of pressure you'd use to give a backrub to a child with a sunburn.  Oh, and this is important: don't change out the paper towel.  As it soaks up the black stain, it becomes more forgiving and removes just the right amount.

Once the black stain had pretty much dried, I painted on a regular coat of brown (I chose MinWax Colonial Pine, because our house is a colonial-- great simplistic reasoning, huh?)  To my relief, it wasn't too dark, and it let the nice black distress stain show through:

The stains on the bottom of the board on the left are from when I opened the can of black stain and it sprayed all over the place, including onto that board; it was very distressing, if you catch my drift.

Here's a side-by-side of a stained board next to a pristine piece of white plywood.

Tomorrow: the assembly of the table.

Coffee Tableau: Part I, or, Scraping By

If there's one thing I love, it's propping my feet up on something in front of the wood stove.  We have an ottoman, but the cat has staked that out as his territory--our daughters even call it "Harvey's couch."  Displacing him would be an unpopular move with the ladies, whether it was to free up the ottoman or, more eccentrically, to use the cat himself to keep my legs raised up.  That kind of thing might fly in a Dr. Seuss book, but out here in the real world it's frowned upon, no matter how much that cat might deserve it for non-playfully biting your heels and darting inches in front of your legs on stairways after you've had a few drinks.  You're the worst, Harvey.

Anyway, I set out to build a coffee table. I found a great plan for a rustic-looking one at the incomparable Ana White's blog.  Since we have wood floors dating from the early 1900s, I figured I'd try my hand at giving the coffee table a similarly distressed feel.  I didn't really want to go to the expense of buying reclaimed lumber, though, so I decided to cause the distress myself.


I found another cool blog that discusses ways to distress wood.  I borrowed a lot of the techniques they used, and added a couple of my own, too.  The idea was to take soft, brand new pine and bang, scratch, and sand it to make it appear way more experienced.

In the picture below you can see what I used.

 Orbital sander: I used 100 grit sandpaper to sand the surfaces, edges, and corners of each board.

Bag of screws:  The Young House Love guy used this (along with many of the other techniques here).  Basically, you put a bunch of 2-3" wood screws in a sandwich bag and drop or throw the bag at the wood.  It creates a bunch of random indents in the surface.  It's a really cool effect; kind of the canvas upon which the other effects are painted, if you're prone to really pretentious metaphors.

Hammer:  A few clusters of hammer hits here and there.  The only downside to this move is that if you end up having to put a nail in the area of one of these clusters later, you look like an idiot who couldn't hit that nail.

Long metal rod: I laid this across the surface of the board and hammered it:

Eyebolt screw: I hammered this on the board to create semicircular indents.  You can see one above.  I also stood it on its threaded end and banged the eye end to create fake nail holes.

Threaded hook: I used the coarse threads of a hook for hanging up your bike or whatever (I bought these hooks, and have no idea what I intended them for) to scratch the surface of the board up a bit.

Screwdriver:  This was one of my favorite techniques, which I came up with.  I used a regular screwdriver to create deep, narrow, sharply defined holes in the wood.  As you can see below, I often did a few parallel ones next to each other.  It sort of makes you think, "Oh Lordy, what has been smashing into that wood now?"

I also used the screwdriver to just kind of scrape long flat lines into the wood.  The trick is to do it quickly to make the line more or less straight.  Not only will doing so make the table look better in the end, but this is by far the most intimidating technique if someone is secretly observing you distress wood. You're doing this fast, dramatic thrusting move, and they can't help but know you'd probably be really good at stabbing people, if it came right down to it.  Maybe you wouldn't even be doing it in self-defense; maybe you just wondered what it would feel like to shiv someone while you're looking them right in the eye the whole time.  That kind of thing makes folks think twice before tangling with you.

Ella was very interested in helping, so at first I gave her the hammer to let her bang some dents into the boards.  But her backswing was bringing the claw of the hammer to within inches of her eye.  I kept telling her to swing the hammer to the side, but to no avail.  Finally, we decided she might be better off using the hook to scrape the board up a bit.

 

 In the end, we got a lot of cool markings on the boards.  They're kind of hard to see in the pictures here, but wait till you see how the wood stain really brought them out...  

 

(As those ellipses at the end of the last sentence there strongly implied, I'll do another post tomorrow about the staining process I used.)