The Clumsy Girl's Guide to Painting Your Stuff

I mostly stick to writing about personal style for a reason. Despite having the kind of job where I stand on ladders, build and hang things for much of the day I'm almost hopelessly clumsy and accident prone. In my personal life I try to be avoid being around anything that could permanently damage anything else. But Pintrest has gotten to me, like everyone else. After seeing so many tutorials I managed to convince myself that it didn't look so hard. On a bright and sunny weekend I began my attempt at updating furniture on the cheap with two little vintage style bedside tables I had. The shapes were cute, but the thick blonde varnish and chips (and one large-ish burn mark...whoops) were not. I made my mind up to paint them clean white and cover the tops with a trendy chevron pattern. And it actually worked pretty well- and cost less than buying cheap particle board stuff at Target.

First, gather your materials. Just about everything can be gathered in a single trip to a hardware store. You'll need painter's tape, a ruler, a pencil, a couple of paint brushes (a medium one for surfaces and a small foam one for details), some large-grit sandpaper, two colors of paint (indoor/ outdoor satin paint is what you're going for) and a clear topcoat. Optional: an awesome assistant (or significant other) to help out and take pictures of you looking crafty.

Sanding, sanding, sanding.

Start by removing any knobs, decorations, or doors, if possible. Then you want to sand your pieces until you feel like even attempting this project was a bad idea. Seriously, just go at it forever. You don't have to get all of the varnish off, but the surfaces should no longer be shiny and any irregularities should be removed. Give everything a quick wipe down with some rags and surface cleaner and you should be ready to paint!
Your first layer of paint will be your lightest color. This can be anything you want, just remember that it will be easier to paint darker stripes over your base than try to paint light stripes on afterward. I ended up having to do three coats of white paint, but there were a couple of variables here. Despite concerted sanding efforts there was still a lot of varnish on my tables, which meant that the paint had a hard time sticking. I'm also generally not great at painting. Pro tip: after I had chucked on a coat willy-nilly my boyfriend explained to me that paint looks better going with the grain. Who knew! Do this.
After all thousand coats of paint dried it was time for the chevron pattern. This is far less complicated than it sounds. Measure the length of the top of your table and draw a light line in pencil down the center. Then draw two more lines halfway between the center of the table and each edge. Repeat on the other side. You should end up with a grid, and from there you can draw a diagonal line through each box of the grid to end up with a chevron pattern. Alternatively, you can sketch your pattern out on paper and tape it to your table like I did or download one of the many chevron patterns you can find for free online. Whatever you do, follow up by marking you pattern out with painters tape to differentiate between what will remain your base color and what will be painted.

So, here's where I messed up a little. In the interest of saving time I thought it would be easiest to spry paint the stripes. Just one quick coat and we're done, right? I ended up spending a lot of additional time touching up places where the paint had leaked or settled accidentally. I recommend not following my lead and using traditional paint following the lines you taped out and waiting patiently for it to dry before removing the tape. Finish things off with a couple coats of a clear spray sealer to make sure everything stays nice and shiny.

How not to do it

Despite my rookie mistakes I think my dressers ended up looking pretty great. I kind of like that there's a little bit of unevenness and texture in the pattern- it reminds me that I did it myself.