Painting IKEA Furniture: Wood

IKEA furniture comes with a certain 'look' and for some people, that's the look they want and that's fine. But we felt that being in a rented flat with plain walls and little manoeuvre in terms of decorating that we might has well do what we could to add some colour into the rooms.

Before...

The steps to take are fairly simple, and don't actually differ much between various surfaces, but I will be covering melamine in a later post. Overall, this didn't cost us much at all to do.

I've put all the pictures into a gallery otherwise this would have been a very photo heavy post!

Essentially the steps are: sand-prime-paint. We picked up everything we needed from Wilko's (or Wilkinson's, same place). Although, I think a hand sander would have been better for the table as that led to very sore arm muscles.

Here's a list of everything we used:

Sandpaper (Similar)
Paint Brushes
Primer
Ocean Jewel (Table)
Dark Duck Egg (Chairs)
Minted (Bedside Table)

From IKEA:
Table
Chairs
The bedside table is no longer available.

We haven't used a top coat on anything yet as I quite like the dusty matte finish we've got from the paint. The paint has held up really well and it's been almost a month since we did it. Ocean Jewel was the only one we bought in it's full size. The rest we just used tester pots as we knew we wouldn't make a dent in large pot of paint.

It's really difficult to photograph the colours correctly. You can kind of see them in my latest YouTube video which also shows you the bedside table in more detail.

Once the hard work of the sanding had been done, the painting was easy. Lots and lots of coats were needed, at least 3 full coats and then some touch up work. I removed the drawer handle from the beside table but we just painted over the rest of the screws. We're not planning on taking apart anything soon!

The rooms are so much brighter, and it really helped to make everything feel like home.

Oh...and don't forget to cover everything you're not painting in newspaper!

Have you ever up-cycled furniture?