auction buffet in tuscan red milk paint

We recently had the opportunity to donate a piece of our furniture for my church school auction. I toyed with the idea of donating a raw piece that the winning bidder could work with us on customizing, but ultimately decided it would look prettier and get more bids if it had a beautiful makeover.

We hoped a buffet/dresser would be a good bet and appeal to a wide group of bidders. This piece had been in our inventory for awhile and was a nice size, so we went with it. Overall it was in great shape.

The original plan was to stain the top and paint the bottom, but when we moved it out of our storgae unit, we remembered it had damage to the top that prevented an easy stain, so we scrapped the stain and decided to paint the entire buffet. It was so hard choosing between a beautiful buttermilk yellow, olive or farmhouse red, but the red color won us over and we got started. I do have to say, I posted a picture of the raw piece on Facebook and got a few "don't paint that" comments....if we could leave them "as is" and get them to sell we might, but people just won't buy them that way!! Plus, painting is what we do here! To prep the piece for painting, we needed to remove the veneer from the top due to previous damage. Anyone that has done this knows it either goes well or not fantastic - luckily it was not too bad this time.

There are several techniques for removing veneer and it usually depends on how firmly it is affixed as to which way is easiest to remove. For us, we used a hammer and chisel to pop it up in pieces, paying close attention not to gouge the top.

Painting went really well. We used General Finishes Tuscan Red, which I like to say is a perfect "farmhouse red". Three coats later:

It's an aged piece with charater, which we wanted to enhance, so we distressed to give it a perfect shabby look. After waxing the entire piece with clear wax, we added some Annie Sloan dark wax. I love the way the dark wax settles in the cracks and gives that age we were looking for. This piece had some missing knobs, so we found these neat industrial knobs at Hobby Lobby and sprayed them Rustoleum Oil-Rubbed Bronze (Hobby Lobby knobs were white).

Wanted to show you all the original condition of the inside of the drawers.

We updated with a fresh fabric. Love!!

Excited to report that it sold at the auction and got several bids! Money went to the church school, so we were happy to contribute. Last look at the farmhouse auction buffet:

Hope you enjoyed this one as much as we did! Thanks for reading :-)