Weathered Barn Framed Chalkboard

As promised, I am showing you today more details on some distressing techniques I've played around with.

I am by no means an expert, but I definitely had fun helping my friend Cindy who called me up, a little "distressed" about the whole process. She wanted to transform a frame she had painted for a chalkboard    to give it a nice old feel--like it had been through years of sun, snow, and wind. You can get that look by laying it outside for a few years, or you can speed the process up with a faux finish using sandpaper and some elbow grease.

I pretty much said, "Distressed?--one of my favorite words, I'd be happy to help!" The nice thing about creating a distressed look, in my opinion, is that there really isn't a wrong way to do it. I'm pretty bad at projects that require perfection--distressing is so forgiving!

Below, you can see the original color of the frame-a nice paprika red and our beginning marks made with medium sand paper. The chalkboard part, made from cutout plywood painted with chalkboard paint, would be nailed into it later. All we did was run the sandpaper along the ridges of the frame to expose some of the white underneath.

Next, you can see where we sanded more into the center of the frame to expose even more white. To make our faux finish look more authentic, we sanded in random spots, where the frame would have distressed naturally with age. In some spots we exposed through the white layer to a layer of brown wood.

 Below, a bigger picture to show the overall effect we were looking for. We were almost done!

Next, we nailed in the plywood chalkboard to the back of the frame to complete the project.

Works great! 

A nice spot to put the chalkboard-kid level! 

Cindy's girls loving the huge new chalkboard! 

You're welcome! 

Now that I have given you a more detailed look at my version of the distressing technique-do you have any questions? You can ask below by clicking on the "comments" tab. Thanks for reading! 

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