I picked up this little box off the curb a couple months ago.  Off my neighbor’s curb to be exact.  She tends to supply me with goodies on a regular basis.  My last score prior to the box was a solid set of old wooden shelves (all 2x lumber) from her garage  that were re-purposed into a great bench for the front porch.  Love the bench, but not the finish so it is on the need to sand and repaint list.  One of my least favorite lists.  Anyway, back to the little box.  It had definitely seen better days, but I love a challenge.

It was in fairly rough shape with a few gouges and scrapes, along with being a little wobbly.  The paper design that was originally glued to the wood was peeling and flaking off the box.

After a lot of sanding, glue and wood filler it was back to decent shape.  I wasn’t expecting any miracles, but wood glue & filler can accomplish some amazing things.  This is it post sanding and filling.  The lid had suffered the most abuse and needed quite a bit of TLC to get it back into usable shape.  My goal wasn’t  to create a perfectly smooth finish,  since I knew it would end up with a distressed paint finish in the end.

Now it was ready for paint and little did this box know, but it was going to be my stripe painting guinea pig.  See I needed something to practice painting stripes on and this little box was perfect for a couple of reasons…it was free and it was small.  Why do I need to practice painting stripes??  Mainly due to the fact that all of my previous stripe painting projects have been big ol’ fat failures and I really think I want to paint stripes on top of my coffee table (it so needs a makeover).   So after doing a little research to figure out what I was doing wrong I found a couple of tips that I figured it couldn’t hurt to try.  One tip was to use Frogtape.  More expensive, but it seemed to be the most recommended.  Another was to Floetrol to create the smoothest paint finish.  And, last was to paint the base coat over your taped piece BEFORE painting the stripe color.

Armed with the new tips I was ready to paint some stripes.  I debated on doing chevron stripes, but I wasn’t  feeling quite that ambitious.  Plus it seems like you can’t get away from Chevron stripes anymore they are everywhere, so plain jane stripes it was.  My box was first painted a light beighy color that I mixed up from a couple of oops sample paint pots.  Then it dried for 3 days (at least) before I applied the tape.  The Frogtape I purchased required a minimum of 3 day curing period before applying.  Not sure if all of their products require the same amount of dry time.  It was also 1.5″ wide.

I don’t really have any pics between the taped stage and the final finished box, so here is a brief sum up of what I did.  I made sure my tape was firmly pressed down along all the edges before painting another layer of the base coat.  My base coat was mixed with a little of the Floetrol mentioned above and it really does help create a super smooth finish.  Then I let that dry for about an hour.  Next came the actual stripe paint color and it took 2 coats.  I waited about an hour in between coats.  Once the second coat was applied the frogtape was removed.  Another tip is to never wait until your paint dries completely before removing tape, it will pull off some of your base layer with it.  Then it was time to let everything dry again.  It actually ended up being several days before I was able to get back to the project, so the paint was definitely cured before being sanded down to create the distressed look.

Finally, I mixed up some glaze with a little bit of dark chestnut brown oops paint to age the piece further.  Two coats of glaze seemed to do the trick.  Now it just has to be sealed to protect all my hard work.

And, how did all the stripe paint tips help in the final result??  Like a charm.  All the stripes were perfect.  No bleeds under the tape and a crazy smooth finish.  I am so ready to tackle my coffee table now.