How To Make Wood Look Distressed: DIY

Perhaps you’ve decided to give your wood furniture a new lease of life. Or maybe you want to work on making wood look distressed. Either way, you wonder how to age your wood furniture to look beautiful. To make your wood look rustic, use the following tips:

• Process the wood;
• Imitation of natural consequences on a wood;
• Work on the surface with a wire brush;
• Sand the edges of the wood;
• Use vinegar;
• Apply a coat of light paint;
• Apply polyurethane varnish to the wood.

Making new wood look old is one of the best ways to improve your furniture’s look. It won’t be hard to do this. You will need to stock up on specific tools and follow our step-by-step instructions.

Our guide will help you give your furniture old-looking wood in a safe and modern way.

Aging Your wood: A Guide

So, if you want to make your wood furniture look old, follow steps to achieve your goal. We have prepared a series of steps to help you get an aged look for your wooden furniture. Be careful not to overdo it to create an unnatural look for your wood furniture. So, let’s take a closer look at a number of our steps that will definitely help you achieve your goal.

Process the wood

The first thing you need to start with is treating the wood with distressing tools that will help make your wood look more worn. Use whatever tools are available to help you achieve this goal.

Let’s look at a few options on how you can wear out wood using distressing tools:

1. The first option would be to use blunt tools with which you can add chips, bumps, dents, and similar signs of old wood to wood. Try tapping the surface of your wood with a hammer, and you will notice how it leaves marks on the wood.
2. Another way to get old-looking wood is to drag a metal chain across the surface of the wood or scratch the wood with the threads of a large screw. It will help form specific grooves on the wooden surface, giving the wood an antique look.

Imitation of natural consequences on wood

In the next step, we will continue to work with damaging the wood with specific distressing tools. Here are a few methods on how to do this:

1. Using an awl, make holes in the wood surface to look like a wormhole.
2. Place several pieces of gravel between two planks. After that, insert it on the board that lies on top and ride it back and forth, thereby cleaning the surface. Do this carefully, sticking to strong objects that are near you.

Work on the surface with a wire brush

To create more irregularities on the surface, work it with a wire brush or a drill with a brush attachment. If you are working with a softwood type, you can use wire types of brushes, which are good at scraping off the soft fibers of the wood.

Sand the edges of the wood

As a rule, new wood boards have sharp edges. Therefore, you need to achieve more round and uneven edges with sandpaper. This tool rounds the edges of the boards so they look rough and different from each other.

Use vinegar

You can use chemical dyes to get more old-looking wood. We will give you some tips on using vinegar to give your wood a more worn look:

1. Place the steel wool in a jar or other comfortable container for you to work with.
2. Pour a white distilled bite into the same container to cover the cotton and leave it all for 10 hours. Use one to three wool pads and half a gallon of vinegar. The material depends on wood color you want to get.
3. When the solution is ready, use a brush to apply a large layer of the mixture to your wood and leave the wood in the vinegar for a while.

If you don’t have distilled vinegar, you can use regular vinegar and a small number of nails instead of steel wool. You can also use black tea to add to your vinegar solution. It will give the paint a darker color.

Apply a coat of light paint

Also, to make your wood look rustic, you can paint it two different colors.

• For example, you can apply a coat of primer or white paint, and after it’s scorched, cover the wood with a bright coat of paint, such as red or green.
• After the last coat of paint completely dries, sand the top until the bottom coat shows through. Don’t try to sand the surface evenly. The more inaccurately you sand the top layer of paint, the older the wooden surface will look.

Use our article to refinish furniture in the right way.

Apply polyurethane varnish to wood

It will be the last stage of your work with wood. To give shine and smoothness to your wood, apply polyurethane varnish, which is made on an oil basis. It will age your wood, and you will be able to achieve the desired result faster.

Thus, we have given you a complete guide with detailed steps, using which you will be able to make your wood look rustic. Follow our instructions step by step. Don’t try to make everything perfect. A little carelessness will make your furniture look natural. However, do not overdo it during polishing and several other rough actions not to give the furniture an unnatural look. We are sure that thanks to our instructions you will succeed!

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