Buy unfinished furniture and distress it to create a truly amazing antique piece

Buy unfinished furniture and distress it to create a truly amazing antique piece.

If you are the one who simply loves antique furniture but cannot afford such expensive real antiques don’t get disheartened, buy unfinished furniture and distress it to get that true antique look to your furniture, and trust me, people will not make out the difference!

Let us take a closer look at unfinished furniture and its several advantages.

Unfinished furniture is nothing but wooden furniture completed in all respects but for the final finishing touches. It comes in bare wood or call it nude wood with no paint, polish, stain or varnish on it, the option of completing it is left to the purchaser.

The greatest advantage in buying this type of furniture is that it comes at a relatively low price; adding finishing touches to futniture is pretty time and labor consuming and quite expensive to the maker of furniture; by selling the unfinished product the manufacturer saves on a lot of money and these savings are passed on to the purchaser.

By buying unfinished furniture one can make sure that the furniture is made out of real wood and not particleboard and one can also make sure that the wood has no flaws in it.

In finished products it is very difficult to locate the flaws since they are covered up properly before they are polished or painted. Later on the cracks show up and the furniture loses its look and also becomes weak.

There are several other advantages in buying unfinished furniture; since the wood is in its natural color it can be made to match with the other furniture in the house, and one can select the wood of their choice like oak or cherry for the antique look and pine or maple for furniture in a lighter color for its modern look. If someone wishes to make the furniture appear old and used with an antique look one can distress the unfinished furniture to obtain the desired look.

Let us see how we can distress the unfinished furniture.

Some may think that distressing wood is a very simple process, but in reality it is not so; one has to be cautious in doing this lest the wood gets permanently damaged. There are different methods for distressing the furniture to add age to it and unfinished furniture is best suited for this.

First you have to create some dents on the surface and this can be done by banging the furniture with a large rock with a smooth surface, but take care not to hit too hard. The dents should appear natural as if they have been damaged over a great period of time.

The edges should be made to look worn out , and for this you could use sand paper of different grades to get a natural effect. This should be done mainly on the places that are more prone to wear and tear like the arms of chairs. Now create a few worm holes with ice picks and stain them a bit with ink but make sure they appear subtle.

The furniture has to be gently sanded on the man made distress marks and then the final paint or stain should be added as per your choice. For a better antique look, paint layers of different colors and then sand the layers for revealng a little of the color beneath just like how a real antique piece would show paint at the edges that are worn out.

Now step back and admire, see how truly antique your new unfinished furniture is made to look!