The Little Greene Blog

Jane Cumberbatch is a Little Greene fan and our new guest blogger. She’s created a guide to re-vamping an old piece of furniture, so here’s her video, and below this is the transcript.

Hi, I’m Jane Cumberbatch. Welcome to my new series ‘Make and Do’. In this film, I’m going to show you how to re-vamp a junk table.

Now I’m somebody who’s always on the lookout for old pieces of furniture from skips and in junk shops, and whenever I go looking for a piece, I try and find something that has some interesting depth of detail. Even if it’s in a colour I don’t like, or a wood I don’t like – I’ll still buy it because you can do amazing things with a lick of paint and I’m going to show you how.

Firstly, materials that you need are paint brushes, and I always use a selection, so that you can use the thinner ones for attending to the more intricate bits of the piece, and a wider one for bigger surfaces.

And then you need sandpaper, and then the paint itself.

I’m using white undercoat, and then the top coat is in the colour of my choice, which is a lovely pale bluey green, and I’m using emulsion.

Now, a lot of people say you can’t paint wood with emulsion, but I say no, because if you want a nice matt texture, emulsion is really one of the best textures to use.

Now before you start, the most important thing is to wash and clean the object that you want painted, because if you don’t you’ll find that the paint won’t stick, and you’ll find yourself in a lot of trouble.

I think that the best thing is just to use some detergent and water and a sponge, and to really give everything a good clean, because old pieces of furniture will have years of accumulated grease and cake crumbs perhaps. And it’s really important that you do the cleaning.

After you’ve washed the table or your piece of furniture, the next thing is to sand it down so that it has a good key for the paint, because the paint actually needs to bond to the surface.

You work over the area, up and down, sanding. So you continue until every little bit of the object is finished.

Right, I’ve finished the sanding, and you now have to give this a wash.

Now the first thing is to put on a coat of undercoat, and I’m using waterbased, because it is quick to dry and I like the matt texture, and it’s quite easy to find a universal undercoat at the hardware merchants or your local DIY superstore.

You need to keep a good gentle backwards and forwards motion so that you get a nice smooth effect.

Once you finish with the undercoat, you’ve got to go and wash your brushes. Waterbased paints mean that you can wash them in water, which is a lot better than having to put them in turps or one of the cleaners for oil based paints.

Let the piece of furniture dry for between 1 or 2 hours depending on your local conditions.

Now this is the nice bit, we’re putting on the top coat. This is where you begin to see how paint can transform even the, well I wouldn’t say this table was ugly, but I don’t think it would look very pretty in it’s beaten up state when it was on the skip.

Anyway, you apply the paint in a nice sweeping backwards and forwards motion. Good quality paint doesn’t need so many coats, and you might find that if the piece that you’re painting is very dark, you might need more than one coat, because you need more paint to cover up the dark colour beneath.

What I have learnt by bitter experience, is do not overload the brush. It’s really tempting to slop on the paint to get quick coverage, but you do this at your peril, because it simply means your paint falls off onto the ground or on your shoes or in the place that it shouldn’t be.

You shouldn’t worry about making your piece of painted furniture absolutely perfect. The idea is to actually have a few imperfections, because part of the charm of painting things yourself is that you can make it look more personal by painting it in this way.

Well, here I am, and here’s the finished junk table, and it doesn’t look junky any more. I think it looks really pretty, and it’s the sort of thing that you can use by the sofa or put it by the bath to put soaps on, or even put it by the bed.

I hope that you will have been inspired to do something similar with a junk shop or skip find.