DIY Country Heart Shelf Turned Coastal Cottage Eye Candy

I took a garage sale find from dated country hearts to a more sophisticated two-tone coastal cottage shelf. Follow along and I will show you how I did it! :). Side note...I want to take a bow now because I listened to my husband tell me that this piece was a no-go. He was so WRONG about this piece. This one ended up being a cool wall or base shelf. I love it, even if Marco thinks I actually mugged a little old lady outside of Goodwill for this piece
I started with this $15.00 garage sale find. I quickly removed the heart shaped doors and pried off the top section of hearts as well as the bottom heart skirting.
I then filled in the holes with Elmer's wood filler. It dried in less than 15 minutes and I gave the piece a nice sanding and got ready to paint.
For this project I used the Annie Sloan Chalk Paint(TM). I made a custom mix of country grey and old ochre - I only had a little bit of each color and transferred whatever I had left of each color into a canning jar. I used a chip brush to apply it because I need to have control in the corners and with the bead board backing.
While the chalk paint(TM) was drying, I grabbed a sponge brush and my Minwax, dark walnut, oil based stain. I simply stained the top to give it that two tone look that I absolutely love right now!
Next, I applied the stain willy-nilly over the paint making sure it got into the grooves. I did play with some of the areas that had wet paint and manipulated the brush to allow for some distressing. I am an instant gratification kinda girl - like I have zero patience and can't stand watching paint dry.
After that was done - so was I. It was a very simple 1 hour project. Here it is finished and staged with some close-ups of the details. Hope you enjoy and more importantly, hope that you learned that you can take a dated piece of furniture and with a little work it can be transformed into something beautiful once again.
Thanks so much for reading my project! Please feel free to comment.
Renovar Design - A Wife, A Husband & A Hammer
Want more details about this and other DIY projects? Check out my blog post!
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  • Em Em on Oct 18, 2015
    I like it! And hearts have their place but you were on target removing them for a very attractive new product. Congrats!
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